In this quiet family holiday home in Tokyo, Japanese tradition meets modernity

Stepping through the black metal front door of this Tokyo flat, guests notice tatami first, as they remove their shoes. Not underfoot, but rising up the entrance wall, its lower half in black rush matting, its upper portion broken into pleasingly abstract colour blocks like a Mondrian painting. Up close, it carries a soft, faintly sweet, grassy scent.

“I wanted something Japanese that would make everyone feel the destination the moment they arrived,” says Jason Yung, who designed the flat with his wife and creative partner, Caroline Ma, of Hong Kong studio Jason Caroline Design. Yet the result never feels like a stage set, or tips into pastiche – the Japanese influence is intentional, but quietly expressed.

Their client was a Hong Kong-based property investor whose family business keeps him shuttling between Japan, China, countries in Europe and the United States. He wanted a Tokyo base that could double as a family holiday home and a restful landing pad between work trips – close to a subway station, but private enough to feel like a genuine escape. He had worked with Yung and Ma before, on his Southside home in Hong Kong, and returned to them for this one.

Ma trained at Cornell University, while Yung studied architecture in the 1980s at the University of Washington, both in the US, at the height of Japanese design’s global influence, and later at the University of Hong Kong. That grounding in Japanese sensibility, along with a network of contacts built over decades of Japan-inspired projects, became the backbone of this project.

The flat occupies a single floor of a rare three-storey walk-up in upscale Roppongi, and was built in the 80s, when land in central Tokyo could still support such low-rise buildings. Despite being minutes from one of the city’s busiest districts, the outlook from the windows is leafy. The uniqueness of this flat, Yung says, is that it is “surrounded by trees, even though it’s in the heart of Tokyo”.

You cannot move fast on tatami. And that’s the whole idea of a vacation home

The roughly 3,230 sq ft (300 square metre) space originally held four small bedrooms, two bathrooms and a powder room – generous by any standard, and rare even by 80s Tokyo norms. Yung and Ma reconfigured it into three bedrooms with three full bathrooms, one of them an en suite.