Two Meiji-era machiya behind Yasaka Shrine, close to becoming a car park. A Kyoto architect, a workshop of carpenters who build in wood alone brought them back over two years. People who love old wooden houses have looked after them ever since.
The long-time Japanese owner lived in one of the two houses and ran a café in the other. After his death in 2013, the pair was put up for sale. A buyer soon came forward with a different plan for the site: demolish both houses, pour concrete and turn the land into parking.
There was nothing unusual about that. Machiya — the traditional wooden townhouses that give Kyoto so much of its character — have been disappearing steadily for decades. They vanish quietly, one lane at a time. The lane behind Yasaka Shrine was no exception.
These two had stood for more than a century. Lattice façades, cypress beams, a small earth-floored entrance where deliveries once passed through, walls darkened by decades of kitchen smoke.
They were one signature away from disappearing.
Instead, word of the sale travelled all the way to Singapore.
The new owners had no background in hospitality. They were travellers who had spent enough time in Japan to understand what is lost each time a machiya disappears. So they acted quickly. In 2014, they bought both houses and the land beneath them outright, using their own funds, before the site could be cleared for redevelopment.
They set themselves a simple brief:
Give these buildings another hundred years.
Then they entrusted the restoration to people who understood how to preserve them.
The design was placed in the hands of Asami Architects and Associates, a Kyoto practice experienced in restoring machiya without erasing the traces of their past — soot-darkened beams, gently uneven floorboards and the character accumulated over generations.
The construction was carried out by Tsuji Komuten, specialists in traditional wooden buildings. The houses would remain timber houses in both structure and spirit — not historic façades wrapped around a steel or concrete frame.
The brief was simple: preserve everything that could still be preserved, replace only what had truly failed, and add only what was needed to make a century-old machiya comfortable for modern life.
The load-bearing beams and posts — cypress and pine that have supported these houses for more than a century — were retained wherever they remained sound.
The lattice façades, mushiko-mado insect-cage windows, clay walls and baked-tile roofs were preserved wherever possible, rather than stripped away and replaced.
Over generations, smoke from cooking gradually darkened the clay walls of a machiya. Where sections of wall had to be re-plastered, the craftsmen mixed soot into the fresh clay so that the new surfaces would sit naturally beside the old.
The result was new plaster with the depth and tone that the original walls had taken a century to acquire.
New · Quiet comfortHeating and insulation were threaded in behind the existing walls, heated floors laid under them, and the kitchens built new but kept small. Everything modern is there; almost none of it shows.
Work finished at the end of 2015. Two houses that had been close to demolition were standing, sound, and ready to be lived in.
The houses opened in 2016 as private homes to let. One party takes one house: the kitchen, the bath, the garden, the front door, all of it, for as long as they're there.
That was always the point. A restored machiya doesn't survive by being admired; it survives by being lived in: heated in winter, aired in summer, walked on daily. So the houses were let the way you'd lend a friend your home, and everything else was built around that.
BenTen is owned today by a husband and wife from Singapore with a weakness for old wooden houses, the kind of people who will cross a city to look at a roofline. They took the houses on already whole. The restoration owners had done the hard part: they rescued the houses from demolition and funded the two-year restoration. The current owners acquired the restored houses from them and continue the same principle of stewardship. Everything you can see and touch here exists because of that first decision.
So the job now is a different one: continuity. They keep these two houses the way you keep anything you intend to outlive you: carefully, unhurriedly, with the work never quite finished. A roof tile at a time, a paper screen at a time.
That extends past their own front doors. Kyoto's machiya still come down at about two percent a year, and every restored house that stays standing, stays used, and stays worth the money is an argument against the wrecking ball. The two of them would rather make that argument with a building than a pamphlet.
A decade in, the terms are what they always were. Two houses. One party in each: not a floor, not a wing, but the whole house, with nobody else in it, from the front door inward. You are handed a hundred-year-old front door and it is yours until you leave.
The standard hasn't moved either. Housekeeping every other day, arranged with care to preserve guests' privacy: enough fresh towels are prepared at check-in for daily use, with used towels and amenities replenished at each visit. The bath run hot and waiting if you say the word on your way out.
Takase-san welcomes guests at the house, hands over the keys, and turns up when something is needed. Guests write that name in their reviews more often than they write about the architecture.
One party per house. Never shared.
Housekeeping every other day.
The bath drawn for your return.
What ten years added is everything around the stay. Every booking comes with our bilingual concierge, working in English and Japanese: restaurant bookings, an itinerary, transport and the practical arrangements that trip up even seasoned travellers.
It reaches you as one itinerary: routes you can walk, trains that run at that hour, reservations already held in your name. Not a folder of links. Something you follow, and it works.
Dwell put the houses on its Top 10 Vacation Homes list in 2017 and came back for a full feature the year after. Useful, but not the measure. The measure is that both houses are still standing, still maintained, and still lived in.
BenTen’s restoration has been documented as architecture in its own right — with credit given to the people who designed, rebuilt and preserved it.
A full feature on the restoration: the retained latticework and mushiko-mado windows, clay walls and tiled roofs, and the careful modernisation of the interiors without erasing the houses’ past.
Read the feature →BenTen was named one of Dwell’s Top 10 Vacation Homes of the year — recognised for preserving its timber structure and bringing two historic machiya back into use rather than replacing them.
View the feature →Writer Michael Lambe experiences BenTen West from the inside — the rooms, the bath, the garden and the pleasure of exploring Higashiyama directly from the house.
Read the review →Who built the houses, when, and what was kept.