40 
House & Garden 
Apparently American arts-and-crafts, 
but really Japanese made and designed 
throughout. Yutaka Hidaka, decorator 
\ 
Modern European style in which Japa¬ 
nese details are evident characterizes 
this room in the Kyoto residence 
The drawing room for foreigners in the Sumitomo 
European house at Tokyo 
While the problem of receiving 
Europeans in the manner to which 
they are accustomed, and at the same 
time retaining purely Japanese sur¬ 
roundings for the life of the family 
was solved in the residence at Osaka 
by furnishing and decorating certain 
rooms in the European manner, a 
quite different method has been fol¬ 
lowed at the Tokyo estate. There 
two separate and distinct houses have 
been built, one purely Japanese and 
the other European, inside and out. 
In the house at Kyoto several 
rooms have been furnished in the 
European manner in a building that, 
though typically Japanese, is of an 
entirely different character from the 
house at Osaka. With a keen ap¬ 
preciation of the relation that should 
exist between architectural design 
and the character of the landscape, 
the architect has produced in this in¬ 
stance a picturesque exterior, with 
wide projecting eaves, rustic stone¬ 
work and rough plaster walls that 
harmonize with the romantic garden 
and the mountains in the back¬ 
ground. 
The decorative treatment of the re¬ 
ception-room for foreigners is less 
formal in this house than in the 
others and is in keeping with the 
character of the building. It shows 
features of Japanese design united 
skilfully with the dominating Euro¬ 
pean forms in both the wall treat¬ 
ment and furnishings. 
A Tokyo Residence 
The residence of Kanichi Sumi¬ 
tomo in Tokyo seems modest when 
compared with the handsome estates 
of his father Baron Sumitomo. It is, 
nevertheless, a charming house and it 
shows a remarkably successful blend¬ 
ing of Japanese and Occidental 
ideas. 
Standing in a garden that is at 
The drawing room in the residence of Baron Sumitomo at Osaka 
represents the latest phase of Occidental interior decoration in Japan 
.4 portion of the main salon in the home of Baron Mitsui in Tokyo. 
While the wall treatment is Japanese, the furniture is European style 
once simple and pleasing^ this-house ! 
looks almost as though it might be ! 
in a residential suburb of an Ameri- i 
can city. In the second story there is : 
what appears from the outside to be ' 
a glass-enclosed sun-parlor, but is, : 
in fact, a large living-room in the 
Japanese style. The reception-room 
in foreign style is in the lower story. 
It is a typical .American Arts-and- j 
Crafts interior, though everything in i 
the room was designed and made in | 
Japan. 
While all of these houses were de¬ 
signed and decorated by the same 
architect, Mr. Hidaka, they show a 
variety of treatment that gives evi¬ 
dence of careful study in each in- : 
stance and of the logical development 
of the designs from the conditions 
and requirements met with. 
The rooms described represent the : 
latest phase of Occidental decoration i 
in Japan, for none of them is older 
than three years and those in Baron i 
Sumitomo’s house at Osaka have just : 
been completed. They are very much 
like their European and American 
rooms and in this respect they differ 
widely from rooms furnished less 
than a decade ago. 
Baron Mitsui’s Home 
Good examples of the latter period 
are in the home of Baron Mitsui at 
Tokyo, where in every case the in¬ 
terior architecture is essentially Jap¬ 
anese, while the furniture and fur¬ 
nishings are of the European type. 
The large salon has walls com¬ 
posed of sliding screens painted in 
landscapes such as are frequently 
found in Japanese houses. Daylight 
is admitted through the translucent 
paper that covers typical shoji. Over 
the wide opening between the two 
sections of the room is the usual type 
of grille or ramma. 
The chief feature of the wall treat- 
