There is an ordinary Japanese house next door to the Western one. Kitanochō and Yamamoto-dōri occupy the slope behind Sannomiya, and the ijinkan — the foreign residences — are distributed along the hill roads with Japanese houses standing between them. This is not a preserved enclave of Western buildings. Both kinds went up on the same streets from the beginning, so a mixed street is the original condition here rather than a later dilution of it.

The district was designated an Important Preservation District in April 1980, and a number of the houses are open inside. Sannomiya is close enough to walk from, though the gradient is serious, and rents are at the higher end for the city, so living here asks something of the legs as well as the budget. Going through the open houses one after another, what emerges is that residences built in the same decade differ according to where their occupants came from: the sequence of the rooms, what opens onto what, where the household was expected to gather.

Build on a slope and you see the sea over your neighbour's roof. How much sea depends on how far up you are, so the windows on a single street face in noticeably different directions from house to house, and that unevenness is what makes a hillside neighbourhood look unplanned even when it was not. A slope is inconvenient in every practical respect: deliveries, bicycles, old age, the walk back from the station with shopping. The one thing it distributes fairly is the view, which arrives at every house on the hill whether or not the household can afford it.