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Keyhole House by EASTERN Design Office

Eastern Design Office, well-known for their unconventional architectural designs, built the Keyhole House in Kyoto based on a simple idea: the keyhole.

While the facade is your typical house shape with a triangle roof, it’s marked by a window shaped like a keyhole (not a traditional-looking keyhole). A thin eave made of steel appears to float above the door and window.

From the designers:

A key to open “my house”, which is standing along a narrow street of a crowded town, is designed as a key itself on the façade of this house. A house can be called a key, which will open up your life happily. Such a small key, this house is a key!

The red-wine colored door pops on the outside and from the inside against the concrete floors and white walls.

Built for a family of four people and two cats, the small house is laid out over 100 square meters.

Small windows in various sizes punctuate the structure of the home.

Clearly the house was built with the homeowner’s cats in mind – notice the wood cat walk close to the ceiling?

Photos by Koichi Torimura.

Caroline Williamson is Editor-in-Chief of Design Milk. She has a BFA in photography from SCAD and can usually be found searching for vintage wares, doing New York Times crossword puzzles in pen, or reworking playlists on Spotify.