British Antique Museum Kamakura
Japan · Asia
About
British Antique Museum BAM Kamakura (アンティーク BAM; Eikoku Antīku Hakubutsukan BAM Kamakura) opened in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, in 2022. Located along Wakamiya Ōji on the approach to Tsurugaoka Hachimangū, the museum building along with its fourth-floor tea room was designed by Kengo Kuma, with a windowless façade inspired by the local craft of Kamakura-bori woodcarving, executed in Japanese cypress with a CNC cutter, with incisions that gradually reduce in scale for perspective effect and to blend with the sky.
The museum displays antiques from the collection of founder-director Dobashi Masaomi [ja], with a Georgian Room, a Victorian Room, and a Sherlock Holmes Room. The tea room incorporates in its walls wooden members from a Hōjō residence excavated on the site where the museum now stands, together with a floor of oak from English manor houses, and hanging scroll-style windows with views of the forested hillside behind the shrine, saved from development in the 1960s by the National Trust-inspired efforts of Osaragi Jirō and others that would lead to the establishment of the Japan National Trust.
Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.