Our Services
Our goal is to increase awareness, appreciation, and conservation of the tremendous built heritage in rural Japan through salvage and adaptive reuse of abandoned and derelict structures. Kominka North America and our Japanese partners only offer historic structures that are imminently threatened with demolition.
Kominka North America can often supply a range of authentic architectural elements to compliment our timber frames. These range from shoji screens and doors to tansu stairs, furniture, and decorative elements. Roof tiles, stone garden features, and other architectural salvage items are also available. As with our timber frames, all these items are true salvage materials, otherwise bound for demolition. We do not condone, encourage, or participate in any sort of cultural destruction for export.
The depopulation of rural Japan and abandonment of countless traditional farmhouses and other buildings is a large-scale phenomenon with cultural, economic, and technological roots in the rapid industrialization of the nation between 1945 and 1965. How Japanese society and policy respond to this over the long term remains an open question. The present reality, however, is that thousands of traditional buildings, many long abandoned, are demolished each year—bulldozed and incinerated—and once gone, the elegant forms, stunning craftsmanship, beautiful aged materials, and stories of lives lived within those walls are lost forever.
Kominka North America sources unique, authentic timber structures directly from Japan. We participate in their deconstruction, repair, and preparation for reuse. Once your structure arrives on these shores, Kominka North America provides the installation support necessary to realize your project. This can range from consultation and supervision working with a general contractor's crew to providing a full installation service through our relationships with the best timber frame specialists throughout North America.
We work with architects, designers, contractors, and clients to select structures to further their design goals. Our structures are adaptable to a wide range to new uses. New construction homes, renovations, additions, studios, and retreats are some residential possibilities. Public and commercial uses include unique restaurants, retail spaces, pavilions and other feature assembly spaces.
We regularly work with some of the best solid-timber specialty engineers to find elegant solutions for retaining the original character of our buildings in light of contemporary structural requirements.
