Set behind a low garden wall on the outskirts of Osaka, the house disappears almost entirely from the street. What remains visible is a single plane of board-formed concrete, weathered to the exact grey of a winter sky.

The architects describe the project as an exercise in subtraction. Rooms open onto a double-height courtyard, and light enters the plan indirectly — reflected off a tall plaster wall so that it arrives softened, almost fog-like.

The clients asked for a house that would "feel the same at six in the morning and six in the evening." The answer, in practice, is a sequence of spaces calibrated to the sun: a breakfast room facing east, a reading gallery facing west, and a long central hall that belongs to no particular hour.

Material restraint does the rest. Concrete, plaster, ash timber and linen appear throughout; there is not a single painted surface in the building. The result is a home that photographs like a quiet landscape and lives, according to its owners, "like a held breath."