Home design ideas
01 Mar 2026 | #housing | #japanWe recently built our home in Tokyo with Ichijo. I already wrote about the process of designing our house, and designing our lighting, and in this post I’ll write about the major design ideas we used for our house.
We have moved in about 3 months ago, so I can also share how well these ideas are working out. To protect our privacy, I decided not to share the full layout, so I’m sharing it as ideas and specific rooms.
Second floor living room
Lands in urban centers (especially in Tokyo) are small, so houses are often close to each other. Getting natural light was important for us, so we decided to put the living room on the second floor on the South-East side. Our land opens from the South, and the neighbor to the East is a single-story house, so this means the LDK (living-dining-kitchen) gets a ton of light, especially from the morning to early afternoon.
This way the balcony (on the South side) also opens from the living room, which makes it perfect for laundry. And since we have the bathroom and the washing machine also on the second floor, it is easy to hang the laundry. In the evening, it is also easy to move the laundry inside, as we have a laundry pipe in the living room near the balcony door.
Another benefit of the second floor living room is that the space over the stairs make the room feel more spacious.
Storage, storage, storage
You can never have enough storage. Especially in a house of 95 m2 (29 tsubo), it is very easy to run out of space, and then cleaning up becomes impossible. So we did our best to include as much storage as possible.
Attic storage
The biggest storage space we got is in the attic. The size of the land defines the maximum floor space of the house (e.g. 80%), however rooms with height under 140 cm don’t count. So it is possible to add an attic storage or loft without using additional floor space. Ichijo offers 2 solutions (both are paid options):
- attic storage (屋根裏収納 or 小屋裏収納) - this is a separate room in the attic with a foldable ladder
- loft (ロフト) - this has a fixed ladder and is open on one side, so the air is shared with the room
We got the attic storage, and it is such a life saver. It stores the suite cases, the skis, the baby bed we don’t use, seasonal decorations (e.g. Christmas tree), camping stuff (tent, sleeping bags, cart), etc. In previous apartments these would take up most of the walk-in-closet, but having a dedicated space for them is much better.
For more details, I recommend reading this blog post that goes into a lot of details.
Underfloor storage “train”
Under the first floor there is a crawl space, so many Japanese houses have an underfloor storage box. Ichijo goes a step further and instead of a single box, they install a “train” of boxes (3 or 5 “cars”) that slide back and forth. Ichijo calls this 床下パントリー (underfloor pantry). The main limitation is that the entire “train” has to fit without hitting a wall (as most walls continue in the crawl space).
We got this in the corridor of the first floor, and it is great. We store our earthquake emergency bag, bottled water, and our wines. I was struggling to find a good place for our wine collection before: I didn’t want to put them near the floor, as the kids could reach them, but putting them high would risk them falling in case of an earthquake. Keeping them here is (sofar) the best solution. This storage is outside the house and thus it gets cold in winter and hot in summer, so I might need to reconsider if this becomes an issue.
Under the stairs
Ichijo offers open and a box-style stairs, and if one chooses the box-style, then under that can become storage.
We use this to store the DIY tools (drill, sander, saws, etc.), the vacuum cleaner, and the recyclable trash. Our city collects the burnable trash twice a week (this is the catch-all for everything non-recyclable), but paper and plastic are only collected weekly, and PET, cans, glass only every two weeks.
House that grows with our family
As a teenager I remember how much I liked having my own room. So it was paramount for me to make it possible for each of our kids to have their own rooms. When we started designing our house, we only had a 6 months old baby, and a plan to have 2 more. So we don’t need 3 rooms now, we need 3 rooms in 10 years. (And that is assuming we do get 3 kids.) Meanwhile we don’t have enough space to let rooms sit empty, so we came up with a design that grows as our family and kids grow.
We put two kid’s rooms next to each other and removed the wall in-between. Each of them still have a dedicated door, a window, a ceiling light, but they became a single, big play room for now. We added carpet ourselves.
The third kid’s room was built as-is, however it currently serves as the family closet: this is where we keep all the kids’ clothes, and a diaper changing table. Originally we planned to keep our own clothes here too (so that the main bedroom gets enough space for the baby bed), but we could fit an IKEA PAX wardrobe and the baby bed in the bedroom.
Overall I’m really happy with this setup. The plan is that as kids get older, they will start sleeping in the play room, and when they get old enough to ask for their own room, we can split that room into two. This also leaves the option open to not split it: just because I wanted to have my own room as a teenager, my kids might decide to share a room.
Entrance (genkan)
The apartments we lived before always had a very narrow entrance (80-90 cm wide with a built-in shoe closet on one side). This worked great before kids, but once you try to fit a stroller in there, or try to get multiple kids dressed, it quickly becomes too small. So we decided to make ours wide.
Moreover I always had issues with where to hang my coats: my wife brings hers to the closet in the bedroom, but I’d rather leave them at the entrance. Also when we have guests, it is nice if they can hang their coats at the entrance. So we made sure to have space for hangers here.
We got the usual shoe closet, but I also found that we have things that don’t fit well in there: bicycle helmets, bicycle battery charger, keys. So we put another set of shelves on the side of the entrance door. We left the bottom of this big, so that the stroller can fit in there, and added some plugs in the middle, so that the bike batteries can be charged. This is great when I forget to bring the battery and have to come back to pick it up.
We also added a sink at the entrance. When we come home, we can wash hands immediately. Since the bedrooms are on the first floor, this can also be used for brushing teeth or putting on make up. Then there is a toilet on the first floor too, and we also change diapers in the family closet, so having a full-size sink comes handy. We got the sink from WoodOne (same as our kitchen), so it uses real wood, which makes it a nice first impression when entering the house.
Kitchen
I wrote about our journey of getting a custom kitchen, so I just want to quickly mention a few decisions we made.
We decided not to have overhead storage in the kitchen. These are very common in Japan, but they tend to break up the space and split the kitchen and dining space.
This meant that we have less storage, which we addressed in two ways. We made the cupboard one drawer higher than usual (for an overall height of 105 cm). Apart from the additional storage, this also made the top of the counter high enough to be safe from kids (at least for a while). Then we added a small pantry: on the layout we created an empty 91x91 cm square, asked Ichijo to reinforce the wall (so that shelves can be attached anywhere), then created an L-shape shelf system DIY, using materials from the home improvement store, Kohnan.
The last idea I want to highlight here is the place of the trashcans: we left out the bottom drawers of the cupboard at the end, and have the trashcans there. This keeps them close but out of the way. We have the burnable, plastic, and PET here.
Home office
I regularly work from home, so I wanted to have my own workroom/office. However when the entire house is 95 m2 and you want to fit in 4 bedrooms, there is just not enough place for one more full size room. So we made my office small: 125 x 170 cm. We added a (comparatively) large window to the room, which helps make it feel bigger, and made the door a sliding door. Since this room is on the second floor near the LDK, I can leave the door open when I don’t have any meeting, and I can hear if my family needs help.
Sofar the room turned out to be the perfect size: I have a small, 100*60 cm standing desk, and I added wall-mounted shelves behind the chair. Big enough to be comfortable, small enough that it can’t get too messy.
One potential problem though: the room is too small to have a dedicated air conditioner. It has floor heating, so in winter it’s fine, but in summer it will get hot. I have my home servers in this room too, as well as the networking box, and those won’t help with the heat either. The room does have a dedicated air-intake, so that should help a bit. I’m thinking of adding a dehumidifier or a fan if needed.
TV
This is a very minor thing, but something I’m proud of: I attached the TV to the wall in the living room, and hid all the cables behind it. We got sockets and an Ethernet port behind the TV, so the cables are all hidden, and safe from kids. We added an extra WiFi access point behind the TV already, and there is place to add our Nintendo Switch as well. Moreover having the TV fixed on the wall, makes it safe from falling, both from earthquakes and kids pushing it.
