Land prices in Tokyo have come down a lot recently. At Housing Japan, we have been telling customers it is a great time to buy land and build a house. In fact we think it is such good timing – we decided to give it a go ourselves!

We recently purchased some land in Meguro 4chome. Our aim is to produce a house for sale which is of better design, quality and value than anything available in the current market. We thought that blogging our experience may provide useful information for those who are thinking about building a house in Japan.

This is the block of land in Meguro. It has a 5m road to the south, good elevation and is in a quiet residential area.

The size of the land is 132.93Sqm. It fronts a 5 meter public road which is good but it also fronts a private road which is under 4 meters wide so we are obliged to “set-back” the boundary of our land so that the edge of our block is 2 meters from the center of this smaller road. For existing dwellings there is no issue being next to a road which is under 4 meters but when you re-build the law requires this set-back to widen out the narrow roads. After “setback” the useable land size shrinks to 121.95Sqm (36.95Tubo). Technically speaking we still own the “set-back” area of 10.98Sqm, but it will be used as a part of the private road that is shared by the neighbours. You can see the lay-out of the land on the map below.

We have employed an architect who has helped us with projects before. He is a Japanese guy who does very modern and clean design which we like. Check out his website:

http://www.iwanari-architects.com/

Next post I will go through our design phase..