Kamakura sits on the Sagami Bay coastline, barely 50 kilometres southwest of Tokyo. It’s close enough for a day trip, yet Lulla House seems to exist in a different world altogether. The three-storey building sits directly on the beachfront, its sand-coloured plaster facade and rope-strung balustrades facing the bay, with Mount Fuji a whispery silhouette on the horizon on clear days. Recently completed, it is the work of Tokyo studio I IN, and unlike anything else in their portfolio.
Tour this minimalist Kamakura house by I IN
Founded in 2018 by partners Yohei Terui and Hiromu Yuyama – both alumni of the influential Tokyo studio Curiosity, where they worked under Gwenael Nicolas (who recently spoke to us about the future of retail architecture) – I IN has built its reputation on high-spec commercial interiors: the Japanese headquarters of Cartier, Tiffany's Tokyo office, Blue Bottle café, a Pokémon Centre. Lulla House represents a different kind of commission: a private residence for fashion and lifestyle designer Azusa Yamato, whose brand Lulla – which sells the furniture designed for this house alongside homeware and objects for daily life – uses the space as both home and showroom.
Yamato approached I IN after seeing their previous projects. What followed was a design process rooted in character rather than typology. 'They asked for something relaxed and personal, but also expressive and memorable. Like stepping into a world with its own character,’ says Yuyama who led the project. ‘Our first conversations focused more on lifestyle than architecture, how the family wanted to live, work, host people. The spatial concept developed naturally from there.’
The building is organised across three floors, each with a distinct identity. The ground floor, a palimpsest from the building's previous incarnation as a windsurfing school, still houses boards. The second floor opens dramatically to the bay: an uninterrupted living and dining space connected to a terrace via a sliding titanium volume that functions as both wall and entrance. When closed, it punctuates the rhythm of the sea-facing elevation; open, it dissolves the boundary between inside and out entirely.
Kitchen and closet doors are rattan – light, woven, and breathable, and chosen because I IN approached materials here the way a fashion designer approaches textiles. 'We treated the relationship between tiles and grout in the bathroom like fabric and thread,' says Yuyama. Those tiles – custom-made from sand sourced in Japan, in a dusty pink that is Yamato's signature colour, grouted in acid yellow – are the house's most exuberantly fashionable gesture: simultaneously playful and precise.
A newly installed spiral staircase in white plaster set against warm brushed timber anchors all three floors at the building's centre, drawing the eye upward through the full height of the house. The third floor closes around it intimately: an open wardrobe at the building's core, a bathroom occupying nearly half the floor plan, a bathtub oriented directly to Sagami Bay and Mount Fuji.
The exterior plaster was chosen to echo the colour of beach sand, so that the house, Yuyama says, feels as though it had simply risen from the sand. Yamato agrees. Her favourite spot is the living room, where the ocean fills the full width of the west-facing windows and light moves across the water in a way that makes time feel slower. 'Simply being here brings me back into balance,' she says, adding that Lulla House is ‘a place where I can quietly feel my core values of gentleness, grace, and inner strength’.
Which, it turns out, is also a fairly precise description of the house itself.