A 50-year-old Nagoya construction firm has reused decades of timber stockpiled across two of its own warehouses as the primary structure for a combined office and residence, with the available beam and brace lengths driving the building’s floor heights and plan dimensions rather than the other way around. The project, House & Office SH, was designed by Isuki Kamiya and Yui Goto of 1-1 Architects.
Wood Central understands the timber accumulated across the two warehouses over generations, with much of the stock drawn from bulk orders placed by the firm’s previous-generation founder — a working carpenter — as well as salvaged sections collected during demolition. The pieces varied in species, size and condition, leaving the stockpile difficult to standardise into conventional construction lengths.
1-1 Architects positioned the build as a response to a broader Japanese phenomenon, with construction companies and lumberyards across the country holding similar dormant timber stockpiles that are often cut only into finishing materials rather than reused as structural members. The studio approached the surplus “much like extracting rare metals from discarded electronic devices,” treating warehouse stock as an unused urban resource awaiting structural reactivation.
Rather than cutting the sections down to uniform members, Kamiya and Goto worked the existing dimensions directly into the structural model, with floor heights and plan dimensions adjusted as variables against the timber’s fixed lengths. Large diagonal members cut across rooms at unexpected angles, with the structural geometry shaped by the timber’s existing dimensions.
The diagonal bracing replaces opaque shear walls along the building’s short axis, allowing the interior to remain visible from the street while defining the boundary between commercial and residential zones. Each connection demanded a bespoke response, with custom metal fittings fabricated from the irregular pieces’ three-dimensional coordinates and final adjustments made on site to account for warping and decades-old material deviations.
The ground floor is held open and visible to the surrounding low-rise neighbourhood, where many of the small shopfronts and workshops that once activated the streetscape have closed in recent decades as customer traffic shifted to large shopping malls. House & Office SH is structured to reactivate that edge by distributing work, commerce and living functions across levels rather than separating them into discrete vertical zones.
It comes as Wood Central reported on University College London’s Circular Economy Lab and UK CLT demonstrating a CascadeUp modular CLT prototype built entirely from recycled demolition timber, with the Nagoya project applying the same reuse principle in traditional Japanese post-and-beam carpentry rather than engineered panels.
Komatsu Structural Design engineered the connections, with Hirata Construction, now in its 50th year, building the project to Kamiya and Goto’s design in Nagoya from timber its previous-generation founder had ordered as a carpenter and stockpiled across two of the firm’s warehouses.
