The Reception House

Architect Tai Horibe builds his own Sapporo residence as a living forest square — a three-storey home where air, light, and slope create a naturally climate-responsive interior.

Most architects, when building their own homes, reach for the thing their clients never quite let them have. For Tai Horibe, that thing was purposelessness — or rather, its more generous cousin: freedom. Having spent years designing houses around what residents need, Horibe wanted, for once, to build a house without deciding what anything was for. 

The result, a three-storey residence on a quiet hill in Sapporo, Hokkaido, is one of the more quietly radical private homes in recent Japanese residential architecture.Horibe describes the guiding image as a forest square — a place where, as in a forest, you gravitate toward what feels right in a given moment, without instruction. A cool spot for reading. A warm patch of light for resting. The architecture, accordingly, was designed not to impose a single thermal or atmospheric condition but to maintain several simultaneously. A nine-metre atrium running the full height of the building draws warm air upward through a top light on the third floor, keeping the upper floors warmer while the lower level stays cool. The slope of the site, incorporated directly into the ground floor rather than levelled away, adds further variety. To live here is to move through the house in search of the right kind of air.

The richness of a home is not in its size but in the number of different ways it allows you to feel — floor by floor, hour by hour.

The first floor is almost entirely glass, offering a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama of surrounding mountains and sky — a remarkable openness for a city in a climate as demanding as Sapporo's. High-performance glazing and a single wood stove handle the winter. Curtains surrounding the atrium can be opened in cold months to let warm air rise through all three floors, or closed in summer to create a chimney effect that expels heated indoor air through the top light.

The second floor, a pure white LDK with reinforced concrete load-bearing walls left exposed, rises to a ceiling of nearly three metres, filled with light furniture and plants in deliberate, moveable arrangement. The third floor drops the ceiling to one metre ninety and dims the light — a deliberate compression that makes it the house's sleeping and storage space, without a bed in sight. Horibe built a house that breathes. The residents, it seems, breathe with it.

Key takeaways

• Horibe designed his own residence around the concept of a forest square — a home without fixed purpose for each space, where residents move freely through varying thermal, atmospheric, and light conditions across three floors rather than living in a single uniform environment.
• The building's structure does the work of climate control: a nine-metre atrium, strategic curtain use, top-light ventilation, and the incorporation of the site's natural slope create a passive heating and cooling system driven by air flow rather than mechanical intervention.
• By varying ceiling heights dramatically — from full glass openness on the first floor to a three-metre white LDK on the second to a compressed, attic-like third floor — Horibe created a home in which the architecture itself triggers different feelings, paces, and uses without prescription.