At the center of a Tokyo residence dubbed After Image, Japanese practice ULTRA Studio inserts a black cylinder. Large, opaque, and repeatedly present within the field of view, it seems designed to remain impossible to ignore.
The architects imagine the opposite happening over time. As the residents move around the home each day, developing familiar habits and becoming used to partial views of the house, the cylinder may gradually fade from conscious attention. ULTRA Studio compares it to the nose, which remains within our vision while the brain learns to look past it.
After Image | image © Yurika Kono
when the familiar returns to view
Across the city, Apartment in Uehara begins with things that Tokyo residents have already learned to overlook. Beige tile covers countless apartment buildings. Retaining walls flatten sloping sites and raise homes above the street. Taken individually, these buildings can appear wildly different, yet the team at ULTRA Studio sees a strangely generic landscape emerging through repetition, with certain materials and construction habits becoming so familiar that they begin to feel ‘natural.’
The two projects move in opposite directions. After Image introduces an unfamiliar object and waits for everyday life to absorb it, while Apartment in Uehara pulls familiar pieces of Tokyo back into view by shifting their scale and relationships. Across both, ULTRA Studio treats habitation as something that changes how architecture is perceived even long after construction has ended.
Apartment in Uehara | image © Kenya Chiba
AFTER IMAGE builds a house around a blind spot
Completed in 2023 for a young couple and their child, After Image occupies an 81.98-square-meter site in a typical Tokyo residential neighborhood. A relatively busy street runs along one edge, while a narrow alley passes the other, where neighboring residents have cultivated small gardens beside their homes. ULTRA STUDIO turns the expected orientation of the house around. The quiet street frontage conceals much of the interior arrangement, while the alley receives a garden and window, giving the more intimate side of the site the role of a facade.
Inside, the first floor rises to around four meters while the rooms above are compressed beneath a lower ceiling. The black cylinder stands within this tall volume and divides the plan, though its role extends well beyond partitioning space. Views repeatedly catch its edge or disappear behind it. Upstairs, portions of the same cylinder appear inside separate rooms, allowing residents to understand their positions in relation to one another. Open the sliding doors and those fragments align, giving the upper floor a subtle sense of rotation around the form.
After Image | image © Yurika Kono
Other elements complicate the view further. A silver cylinder above the alley window reflects daylight and the garden while concealing pipework. A mirror attached to a blue column lets someone working in the kitchen catch a view of the living room. Elsewhere, forms from one side of the interior reappear as painted shapes on the opposite wall, turning architectural components into images of themselves.
ULTRA STUDIO describes this ambiguity as an important part of its work. ‘We consider ‘mysteriousness’ (a quality linked to emotion) to be a crucial element in spatial thinking,‘ the team tells designboom. ‘Rather than providing immediate answers, we aim to create spaces that evoke questions.‘
After Image gives that mysteriousness a domestic timescale. The black cylinder begins almost symbolically, a strong figure around which the house seems organized. Daily life slowly crowds that symbolism with other associations: the route toward a bedroom, a glimpse caught through a doorway, the position of someone sitting across the room. The residents build an understanding of the house from these fragments, while the architecture that first demanded attention becomes increasingly ordinary.
After Image | image © Yurika Kono
apartment in uehara makes tokyo visible again
Apartment in Uehara sits within a Tokyo neighborhood shaped by steep changes in elevation, where retaining walls and raised concrete plinths frequently create level building sites above the sloping ground. Plants spill over their edges toward the street, producing what ULTRA STUDIO reads as a loose local language of hanging gardens. The same construction also cuts buildings away from the pavement, with tall retaining walls forming abrupt boundaries between domestic life and the city.
ULTRA Studio works directly with those conditions. Portions of the plinth are carved away so the building can follow the existing contours, while concrete floor slabs step upward and downward through the apartments. Planting follows the terraces. Inside, those changes in height become part of daily occupation: a raised slab can become somewhere to sit, while a change of level can loosely divide one area from another without requiring a wall.
Cylinders appear here too, arranged with square columns across a structural grid. They puncture the continuity of the exterior and enter the apartments as conspicuous objects, with some cylindrical volumes containing circulation between the stepped floors. ULTRA STUDIO describes these geometric figures as recurring throughout its work, though their meaning stays deliberately loose.
Apartment in Uehara | image © Kenya Chiba
‘While they do not directly ‘symbolize’ any specific concept, they project a suggestive presence within the space,‘ the architects explain. Their functions shift from project to project, allowing the forms to gather associations beyond the conditions that originally produced them.
The building’s surfaces follow a similar process of recognition and distortion. Materials drawn from Tokyo’s everyday residential fabric reappear with small changes. Standard rectangular tiles receive a highly reflective silver glaze, catching light and carrying it further into the apartments. The finish continues indoors, loosening the visual distinction between facade and room, while the terraced planting draws another piece of the neighborhood directly into domestic space.
Apartment in Uehara therefore begins with architecture that has become almost invisible through familiarity. ULTRA Studio describes beige-tiled apartment buildings as a presence that has simply ‘always already’ been there. Rather than replacing that visual language, the studio amplifies it until its peculiarities return. The retaining wall becomes inhabitable terrain. Generic tile catches the sky. A familiar Tokyo streetscape becomes strange enough to notice again.
Apartment in Uehara | image © Kenya Chiba
ULTRA Studio designs through relationships over fixed images
Color and ornament play an equally active role in this exchange between attention and familiarity. ULTRA Studio describes decorative elements as ‘hedonistic,’ able to work directly on emotion while altering the way scale and depth are perceived. Repeating a color diagonally across a room can make its boundaries feel different, while a colored wall can eventually influence something as ordinary as the furniture a resident chooses to place against it.
The studio develops many of these relationships through drawings that combine plans and elevations, reducing the architecture to lines that can be recolored and rearranged repeatedly. ULTRA Studio calls this ‘making decisions through drawings,’ a process that moves attention away from a single perspectival view and toward connections between individual elements. That approach helps explain why both residences resist being understood from one photograph or viewpoint. Their identities emerge through movement and repetition.
After Image | image © Yurika Kono
ULTRA Studio ultimately describes these accumulations as a form of landscape: a condition where ‘multiple distinctive elements coexist and merge into a singular impression.’ In Uehara, that landscape extends outward into Tokyo, absorbing slopes and familiar construction languages before feeding them back into the apartments. In After Image, it forms inside the house through blocked views and reflected images that change as residents move.
After Image imagines the strange becoming ordinary. Apartment in Uehara takes the ordinary and makes it strange enough to notice again. Between them, ULTRA Studio places daily life inside a continuous exchange between architecture and attention. The home changes as residents learn it, and perception changes alongside it.
Apartment in Uehara | image © Kenya Chiba
project info:
name: After Image (2023), Apartment in Uehara (2025)
architect: ULTRA Studio | @ultrastudio_jp
location: Tokyo, Japan
photography: © Yurika Kono, Kenya Chiba
This article is part of designboom’s MODES OF HABITATION chapter, exploring how the spaces we inhabit can reshape the ways we live together. Discover more stories rethinking domesticity, shared living, and the many forms a home can take here.
The post what do we stop seeing at home? ULTRA studio reframes domestic perception in tokyo appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.