The lattices are red because the paint is bengara, an iron-oxide pigment. Higashi Chaya in Kanazawa is a district of teahouse buildings fronted with fine bengara lattice along a stone-paved street, designated an Important Preservation District in November 2001. Teahouse architecture puts the guest rooms on the first floor rather than the ground floor, and from the street you can read that in the proportions: the upper storey is tall and finished with care, the lower one lower and plainer, which is the reverse of an ordinary townhouse.

Several houses open their rooms to visitors, and walking on past the gold-leaf shops brings you out on the bank of the Asano River. The station is about fifteen minutes away by bus. Everyday shops and services are all here, rents are on the high side, and the visitors' street runs directly against ordinary residential blocks, so the district is never entirely handed over to one use. Day and evening are different places. After dark the rooms are actually in use, the number of people walking drops, and what increases is sound.

A building organised around its upper floor gives nothing away to someone at street level. So there is something odd in the arrangement by which visitors now tour rooms designed specifically not to be seen from outside — and something worth doing in it, because climbing the stairs of one of the open houses tells you in your body what the elevation only implies: a low, dim ground floor, then a room above it with height and light. The whole streetscape is made from those two things, the lattice and the difference between the floors.