Our House

Our house for the year is a Kyo no machiya style home on a small alley in central Kyoto. This is an endangered style of building despite some efforts at preservation and use of some such buildings for trendy cafes and shops. We'll write more about this later but I wanted to get some pictures up. This house was modernized, adding a bathtub (which you can order to be filled or reheated to a certain temperature by pressing a button in the kitchen), fresh flooring, and so on while keeping most of the charming qualities of the house. It is being rented out on a weekly to yearly basis furnished and so you can see photos of it in an advertisement on line (just write me to ask for the link if you want it).

This is the view of Shijou (4th Avenue) from our corner.





It's a fairly busy corner with a bus stop, 24 hour restaurant, with major banks and department stores in the distance. We are in an alley off of this corner, a very narrow street onto which taxis and other non-resident cars are not allowed. Amazingly, you walk a short way down the block to our house and inside all you can hear is the sound of cicadas! Apparently this is pretty common in Kyoto. Perhaps it is because of the wood construction and taller buildings at the major corners blocking the sound as it comes in. Anyway, it's very nice to have the convenience without noise.

Turn around and it's like this. At the end of this stretch it turns right continuing in the same fashion with wood houses, and then again to the left coming out on another big street.