A 200-year-old Kyoto teahouse breaks ground as a residence furnished by Armani/Casa

Feed Corporation, a Tokyo-based real-estate developer, has broken ground on rebuilding a roughly 200-year-old former teahouse in Kyoto's Kamishichiken geisha district into a small luxury residence, with architect Kengo Kuma acting as design supervisor and Armani/Casa furnishing the interior, the company said. The jichinsai groundbreaking ceremony was held on 10 September.

The building, the former Hasegawa residence, operated as a teahouse from the mid-Meiji period into the late Heisei era, according to Feed. Named "THE SILENCE — Furnished by ARMANI/CASA" and billed as the first phase of a wider "THE TIMELESS CONDOMINIUM" project, it will rise on a roughly 257-square-metre site with about 284 square metres of floor space, targeting completion in spring or summer 2028. Feed said it has also enlisted the construction company Kongo Gumi, which it describes as the world's oldest, and a Kyoto gardening workshop it names as Oniwa Uekiji, alongside Armani/Casa's furnishings and accessories, with the finished residence positioned as a second home or hotel-condominium.

Positioned as a second home or hotel-condominium hybrid, the project is a presentation bet on stacking three separate credentials — a geisha-district machiya's heritage envelope, Japan's most closely watched architect, and an Italian luxury furniture house's name — onto a single small building. It fits a pattern already visible in Kyoto, where the city's scarcest historic properties are increasingly being converted into small, branded residences rather than added to the standard hotel-room count, with the near two-year build itself becoming part of the story a buyer is asked to wait for.