Stroll through the Huntington’s globally themed gardens and you’ll feel as though you’ve been whisked off to a Chinese lake or a desert oasis. But amid all of these convincing recreations, the San Marino museum’s latest addition just might be its most genuinely enveloping one yet.
A 320-year-old rural house that was built in Japan and occupied by one family for more than three centuries has been relocated to the Huntington. After a five-year restoration and shipping process, the Japanese Heritage Shōya House finally makes its public debut on October 21.
We had a chance to tour the home ahead of its official opening, and as we meandered along the lush upper pathways of the Japanese garden, through the flower-fronted gatehouse and into the traditional home, it truly felt as if we’d left L.A. behind for a slice of countryside an ocean away.
The home hails from Marugame, a coastal city in the southwest of Japan with a climate not too dissimilar from Southern California (and, yes, it’s the namesake of the noodle chain). It was built as a live-work space for shōya, village leaders who were a liaison between the government and the local farming community. At 3,000 square feet, it’s considerably larger than most other Edo period homes, which were typically closer to 400 square feet. All of that space would allow the shōya to collect taxes, store rice yields and entertain dignitaries. But it was also a private residence, one that might have accommodated as many as four generations at one time.
As for the current generation, L.A. residents Yohko and Akira Yokoi offered their ancestral home to the museum in 2016. The house was carefully dismantled in Japan in 2018 and about a year later was shipped to the U.S. The reconstruction process at the Huntington wrapped up on the house last spring, and work on the garden followed soon after.
The Shōya House was originally crafted using traditional Japanese measurements and tools. But as Robert Hori, associate director of cultural programs, explained during a preview event, for the home’s reconstruction at the Huntington to be up to code, it needed to use American-made nails. That meant that the existing holes in every single roof tile needed to be drilled just a millimeter larger.
You can learn all about the house’s initial construction and recent relocation from a small exhibit inside the dirt-floored end of the home that once housed the kitchen. From here, you can peek into the other rooms and walk into one part of the living quarters via a ramp and protective bit of carpeting around back. There’s even a tranquil side garden that you can squeeze into near the home’s formal entrance. The compound is covered with details that offer a glimpse into life there, from irrigation systems to a tokonoma scroll and floral arrangement to a little window that lets you peep at the porcelain sandal that was used to squat over the toilet.
“The iconic Japanese house in the original garden provides the idea of a Japanese residence,” said museum president Karen R. Lawrence of the museum’s existing hilltop structure, an early-20th-century structure first commissioned for a commercial tea garden. “The Shōya House is completely different. It’s the real deal.”
That authenticity extends to some of the alterations that the home’s ancestral owners made post-1700, notably with the addition of a brick cooking stove sometime in the early 20th century, as well as glass-shutter shoji that replaced the original wood and paper screens. You’ll see signs of repairs in some of the wood beams, too, which are their own sort of time capsule: These resinous red pine logs were probably at least a century old by the time they were felled for construction (and so too were the bugs that worked their way into the wood and never came out).
The Huntington has made a few of its own contemporary add-ons, too, most significantly with the construction of a gatehouse inspired by the walls that surrounded the original property. It’s the first thing you’ll see as you approach the home: an absolutely beautiful field of flowers, flanked by persimmon, citrus and mulberry trees and set against a plaster wall topped with black clay tiles.
Though its public debut is here, the $10.2 million privately funded project isn’t finished quite yet: Over the next year and a half, the Huntington will fill the house with furnishings to create period rooms—that’s also about how much time the museum thinks it’ll need to sort out how to bring small groups of visitors inside the areas of the house with tatami flooring (sans shoes, of course). The house also sits in an area of highly compacted dirt, and it’ll likely take around three years for nitrogen fixing cover crops like beans to turn that into nutrient-rich soil. Finally, there’s an empty footprint behind the home intended for a storage house, which itself is in storage until it can secure another seven figures or so in funding.
Speaking of some numbers, the Shōya House is now likely the oldest building in Southern California—if you’re willing to bend the rules for a structure that didn’t actually originate here. Olvera Street’s Ávila Adobe, the oldest residence in the City of L.A. that’s still standing, was built in 1818, and part of Mission San Juan Capistrano dates back to 1782, making that the oldest surviving building in the state. The Shōya House, though, originated almost a full century before that. (Fun aside: The Abbey of New Clairvaux in Northern California bests them all as it’s reconstructed using the limestone blocks from an 800-year-old monastery in Spain.)
Access to the Japanese Heritage Shōya House is included with regular museum admission ($25–$29). Like the rest of the Huntington, it’s open every day but Tuesday, though the Shōya House is only accessible from noon to 4pm.