Inside a Custom Luxury House in Japan

This is where it's going to be, hopefully. Japan is a beautiful country with beautiful nature and greenery. There are many houses built there, but many new houses are houses that ignore the beauty of the land. We don't want to build such a house, so we're thinking that our house will be the scenery of Oita. I want to build a house that feels natural and green, so I always give it a title, but this time I gave it the title Shiki-no-Ie. Basically, the major highlight of the house is the garden in the middle of the house, so one of the things about the land here is that there's houses on basically all sides of us, and because of that we can't get really views going outside of the house. There's not a lot of nature outside of the house, so we decided to take the opposite approach and put the nature inside the house. This is like a dream come true. It almost didn't feel right that I was given the privilege of him, you know, designing my house. As you can see from the holes in these wood pillars down here, they don't use too many nails and screws for building, again, kind of the skeleton of the house. I would say that, yeah, the skeleton, the structure, kind of like the architectural techniques that they use in traditional, well, building temples in Japan. More than anything, I'm really surprised at how big this garden space is. It's about three to four times bigger than I was expecting it to be based on what Dogen had described. I cannot wait to see how this turns out. This is massive. That's going to be a beautiful, beautiful garden. The house kind of actually looks best at night, from what I'm told. I've never seen the house at night though, so this is kind of a big moment for me because I have been to the model house at night, and that is certainly better looking at night, just the way that the light works. So I'm really excited right now to go in and see what it actually looks like. Really excited. One of the architect's kind of guiding philosophies is that he likes to make houses that make people feel sleepy. So there are essentially no overhead lights in the ceiling, or in the house, and where there is lighting, it's usually no higher than eye level, and it's always using these warmer lights. I'm really, really lucky to have a kind of a courtyard inside the house, and the house is kind of built around this. This is designed the way that it is with this low window, such that you kind of notice it when you look in, and you're like, whoa, what's that? But only a little bit, and we'll kind of get to see this later, but it's only a hint rather, again, rather than the full picture immediately. So this entire kind of wing of the house, this is kind of like the night space. This is where my bedroom and my wife's bedroom, as well as the kids' bedroom is, and leading down this hallway is this big long desk, which is kind of lined with this bookshelf here, and then up here as well. Going back to lighting, another thing that this architect loves to do is to use what's called indirect lighting. It makes it more difficult to look directly at the light source while still providing ample lighting for studying, but if you look across the way right there, that's where the kitchen is, and my wife and I will be able to check on the kids, you know, like when they're studying, or call them for dinner, or whatever it might be, across the courtyard like that, and it's a really cool kind of feature. The guy, the architect, another thing that he really strives for is to not create houses in which it's easy to get away from the other family members. He said that it's common for teens to have, of course, that rebellious phase, and if you give them a really kind of easy way out to escape from the, you know, the other members of the house, they often do, and avoid people, but in putting the desk here, they can't really run away unless they want to, like, study on the floor, although I do that sometimes, so I guess that is an option. And then over here, this is going to be the master bedroom, which is funny because it's smaller than the kids' bedroom, but this is it. Having a house in Japan, again, it gets extremely hot during the summer here, and you absolutely need air conditioners. Now, in a slightly larger house, that means you have to get, like, maybe between four, five, six, seven air conditioners, depending on, again, like, the number of rooms, and that kind of thing, and the architect said we could do that, we could put a single individual air conditioner in each room, but one of the things that I've been meaning to do with this new company that we ended up building with is try a central air heating system, and it really adds to the, what would you say, the unconscious feel of minimalism that you get when you walk through the house. So now we're going to go check out kind of the kitchen, family room, living room area of the house. Now, I don't cook at all, but my wife is an incredible cook, and in that sense, the kitchen was a very important detail. My wife is constantly, constantly, constantly cooking, so she's often working the entire day in the kitchen. She's very conscious about, like, kind of nutrition and that kind of thing, and so we were very particular, she was very particular about the kitchen, and again, because she's working in the kitchen for so long, one of the things that she didn't like about the current kitchen is that it's got the low kitchen hood that sucks up the hot air, and one of the things that she asked the architect was, is there any way we could make, like, an alternative solution that would get, like, the fumes out of the house? Now, in the States, they have those, well, in the States and in other places, it's fairly common these days to have, like, a little thing here that's recessed. That was a potential option, but it was too expensive, so the architect actually came up with this other solution where the hot air goes up through here, and then there's a high power fan up in here that spits it outside of the house, and, like, this is where the refrigerator will go, and I believe that this is, like, not, like, the standard refrigerator size, but it's, like, this area was built to be the size of our current refrigerator, and that's kind of one of the standard refrigerator sizes in Japan. Earlier, I was talking about how you can only get a glimpse of the courtyard through that window down there, and, again, that window is intentionally small such that when you walk over here, you can kind of, as you can see, the ceiling is still a little bit small or low down here, but then it opens up over here, and at the same time, kind of, not same time, but around the same area that it opens up, we also have this giant window right here, and this is the only way to get into the courtyard from the inside of the house, and the other really cool thing about this is that this entire thing goes into this wall here. It's all behind this, like, single part of the wall here, but now we've got this big open area right here. This looks amazing at night. Yeah. What? You know, you know you can get some stars up there, and it's a little cloudy today. Yeah, it's raining a little bit right now, but, yeah, like, oh my god. Oh, wow, and, yeah, I mean, like, how, and this, what this is, this isn't a proper angola, because what an angola is in Japan, it's like, a lot of Japanese houses have, like, these long kind of, what thing, something that looks like this, and what this is meant for is that it gives a way for a person that owns the house to interact with a guest without the guest actually coming into the house, so by having a fair amount of surface area that's kind of, like, in between the inside and outside of the house that's still, you know, covered underneath the roof, you can, like, you know, have, like, a cup of tea with someone, but if you're, if the inside of your house is, like, super messy, and you don't want to necessarily have a guest inside right now, you can just kind of do it in this kind of, like, pseudo-inside part of the house, where it's, like, half inside, half outside, and that's, that's traditional Japanese architecture. Again, it's called an engawa. Now, ours isn't a true engawa, because it's enclosed by the walls of the house, but it's, that's where this design kind of language comes from, so. How do you block out the light, then, for these, these giant windows? And, again, they've taken the traditional Japanese approach of paper doors that are also within these walls, so pull this over here, and it's so cool how it's all hidden. It's, when it, this was, like, kind of the feature of the model house. They've got the same exact wooden mokuzai sashi, and then also it collapses into the wall, like it does here in that model house, and then they also have these, so let's see, these paper doors, and when I saw that, it blew my mind. I was, like, that is the coolest thing I have ever seen, and it was kind of, like, the tipping thing, the, what would you say, deciding factor. I was, like, I want, if I'm going to make a house, it has to be with this company. That's, like, the most beautiful, coolest thing I've ever seen. So cool, and, of course, like, unlike a curtain, there's no place for for dust to collect. Those just go into the walls, and look up at the ceiling right now. This is the brightest this area of the house will ever be. I can look directly at this light right now, and it's not, it doesn't hurt my eyes or anything like this. This is a very soft kind of light right now, and, again, it's like this, such that you can't make it any brighter than this, and in that sense, again, you get sleepy at night, naturally, because rather than having, again, these big bright LED lights on the ceiling that just, like, light up the entire space, it's, like, there's a little bit of soft light here, there's a little bit of soft light here, and there are no other lights in this entire big area. All the other light that comes in is from the sun. As a result of that, this is a very bright area during the day, but a very dim area at night, and, again, it makes you sleep. I'm sleepy right now. I just like standing here. This is a fixed window. This can't be open, but this also has the picture doors. Another cool thing about this one in particular is that these are what are called yukimi shouji, and these are unique in the sense that this panel comes up, and you can allow... Snow is kind of a beautiful thing, and this allows people to look out and see, like, snow in the winter when it snows. The architect is constantly thinking, you know, this is the norm, but is there a different approach to this? One of the things that you guys didn't realize wasn't present, wasn't there when we were in the kids' bedroom and my bedroom is those rooms don't have closets. There's one family closet, and that's exactly what this is, and the reason that he loves this approach so much is because it allows you to do what I'm about to show you guys, which is this is where the laundry machine is, where the laundry machine will go in the future, and rather having to take your laundry and walk it all the way across the house and maybe do, like, two or three trips when you have a family, you know, because that's a lot of clothes, you can just pick it up here, put it here, and then one by one hang it up. So again, it's like this fundamentally different approach. We're used to having, you know, at least some closet space in every bedroom in the typical house, but this doesn't have that because it's going with this completely different approach. There was one thing that I insisted on having, and that's what what this is. I said, I want a pull-up bar because I used to do martial arts tricking, which Norm also used to do, and I used to be really into working out, and I haven't been working out enough properly recently, and unless you buy one of these, like, pull-up, like, frames that take up, like, half of an entire room for, like, a sturdy one, you can't really have them in Japan, and because, like, the door frames can't really accept those, like, what would you say, door frame pull-up bars that you can use in the States quite commonly. But this, again, because we were able to think about this from day one, it's just, it's right here, and if I wake up, you know, work up a sweat, I go from here into the, you know, the shower area, which is right over there, and we're going to see that in a second. Now, there's a ladder here, you're probably wondering what this is, and there's just kind of a storage space up there. This is kind of, like, the highlight feature of the house. I know that this is, like, an incredible house so far, and it is, and I couldn't be happier with it, but this is what makes this house truly special. Beppu is kind of the onsen capital, onsen meaning hot springs, of Japan. It has the higher, the highest concentration of hot springs of any city in Japan, and because this house is in Beppu, we went with that. There's a second miniature, this is called a tsuboniwa, kind of means, like, small mini courtyard here as well, and it opens up, that's, there's no roof right there, so this tree kind of goes up and extends into the sky. All my YouTube buddies, they all live in Tokyo, and it's kind of prohibitively expensive to come out to Beppu, because not only do you have to pay for a plane ticket, which is expensive by itself, but you also have to pay for the hotel fees, and so I was, like, one of the things that I really, really wanted, and specifically for work, is a guest room that my YouTube buddies could come to and stay in. So we haven't moved into the place yet, and in that sense, Norm isn't staying here tonight, but there's going to be dozens and dozens and dozens of times in the future when my friends will come, and they've got this entire room all to themselves. There's a second bathroom up here that, again, my buddy Norm here can use when he visits. He doesn't have to worry about walking across the house in his pajamas and, you know, waking someone up. It's like he's got his own toilet up here. He can stay up as late as he wants and not have to worry about waking anybody up. Okay, so that is the house tour. I hope that you guys have enjoyed it as much as I am currently enjoying it. I mean, again, it's a dream come true, and thank you, Norm, for coming out and helping me, like, document this whole process and making an incredible memory out of this whole experience, in addition to the house itself. It's so, so worth it. We've been working on, like, documenting this for, what, over half a year now? More than half a year. Yeah, yeah, it's been a long, long, long time.