Kominka North America
New Life for Traditional Japanese Timber Houses
Kominka North America strives to give new life to unique traditional timber buildings from Japan. We source authentic structures, such as kominka (traditional farmhouses), kura (storehouses), and gateways, among others, for adaptive reuse primarily in North America. Understanding, appreciating, and celebrating both the form and practice of Japanese carpentry, and the cultural traditions from which it arose, is one of our core values.
Our goal is to increase awareness, appreciation, and conservation of the tremendous built heritage in rural Japan through salvage and adaptive reuse of abandoned and derelict structures. Kominka North America and our Japanese partners only offer historic structures that are imminently threatened with demolition.
These buildings were created by hand, the products of a thousand-year tradition in creating shelter from natural materials found in the local environment. The surfaces, textures, patina, and form of the timbers reflect their organic nature, the hands and tools of the usually unknown carpenters, and the generations of lives in their presence and shelter.
Kominka North America’s program of providing new homes for these threatened structures allows our Japanese partners—committed traditional carpenters concerned about the fate of their country’s often underappreciated common built heritage—to act nimbly when opportunities to save worthy structures arise. This often requires decisive action, within a window of only a few weeks, to save a building from demolition.
