Mirai Architects

I was in the middle of looking for a house on the secondhand market and was just about to buy one when a thought came to me - "why settle?"

While the place we were looking at had a great (great) location, there were niggling things about the house which got me thinking. If this place will cost me an extra blah to make it fit my needs - why don't I just make a house myself?

So, just like Smart Doll, I took a need to make something for myself and decided to turn it into a business. As it turns out, a few of our staff members come from an architectural background which enabled us to get the ball rolling relatively quickly.

Mirai Architects will focus on residential houses in the suburbs of Japan.
The next goal is to create residential houses for myself and staff members. I want to move our HQ to the countryside so that we can make dolls in the morning, go for a mountain hike in the afternoon and come back to make dolls for the rest of the afternoon.

Houses in Japan are DTC (Design To Cost) meaning that the developers spend the bare minimum to sell for cheap to retain profit margins.
Our concept will be CTD (Cost To Design) where just like Smart Doll, we spend whatever it takes to build a quality product regardless of whether the majority of consumers will buy or not.

The majority of Smart Doll customers are children meaning that spending money to ensure the quality and safety of the build is essential. Cheap materials and cutting corners on workswo/manship is not an option when designing products for children.
This is especially true when we start building products that people actually live in.

We have done much groundwork in terms of earthquake proofing, load balancing and safety - having a few architects that already work for us has been handy ;-)

Our first project will start this year where I plan to have a residential building and production studio somewhere in the countryside within a couple of hours drive from Tokyo.

These images are just rendering practices that we have been working on but final designs will feature a more natural look blended with what makes Smart Doll special - Wabi Sabi.
#smartdoll #japan #architecture

This is Alan who has been working on the project for the past few months.