Mexican metamorphosis.

The design of a house in Japan by a Mexican architect draws on Mexican tradition while making obeisance to the host culture.

Ricardo Legorreta's Modernism is tempered by consciousness of Spanish-Mexican traditions and his reworkings of quintessential types - the hacienda or the arcaded courtyard - occur in many of his buildings (AR January 1992). Like his compatriots, he has been influenced by Luis Barragan, whose elemental forms and use of exuberant colour, adobe and stucco seem to embody the abstraction of more ancient types of architecture. Legorreta's use of colour to emphasize the plane, and his attachment to brimming sheets and channels of water recall Barragan (the latter reaching back to ancient traditions of Moorish gardens). The layers of meanings, quotations and fleeting references woven through his stripped down yet vigorous language invest it with richness.

In designing a house in Japan with Japanese associates Kajima Design, Legorreta's language has acquired a new reticence. The planes of strong colour with which his buildings habitually confront the world have been banished to the interior. The treatment of stone and water, and one tiny secluded patio, suggest unexpected coincidences of cultures. The practice's first project in Japan, say the architects, has been both spiritually and architecturally enriching.

The exterior of this house for a reclusive Japanese musician is composed of pure white planes, with volumes stacked and layered down a sloping site. The building looks west across a bay towards the Pacific Ocean and the main prospect is limitless sea and sky. A tall ridge surrounds the bay and scattered around the rocky hillsides are neighbouring dwellings with the inevitable accompaniment of telegraph poles and wires. Standing on a small artificial promontory with a road at the back, the house is separated from its neighbour to the south by a small road running steeply down to the sea.

In this reinterpretation of the hacienda, with cool rooms, spacious verandah, fountain and courtyard, the elements have been arranged to take advantage of views and light. On three sides, the house turns an almost imperforate face to its neighbours; within the enclosing walls, it opens out towards the sea. But even when seen from the far side of the bay, the house has a secluded air due to the inscrutability of white plane and unadorned opening.

The house is a series of interconnecting internal and external rooms revolving around the big central block - a double-height volume containing a living-room with a large opening overlooking the sea, and an inner dining-room with glass doors on each side. On the south-west, it gives on to an abstraction of the traditional verandah, where the slatted continuation of the flat roof creates a shaded arcade along the inner side of a terrace paved in stone. On the far side, wide steps lead up to a peripheral wall and side entrance from the road.

Mediating between house and sea is a long pool of water that, running almost parallel to the ground floor, laps the edge of the big west terrace, extends the width of the building and turns the corner to meet the edge of another terrace to the north. A border of grey stones along the outer edge becomes an austere pebble garden on the west. As in a Rorschach test, one thing becomes another, and the Barraganesque acquires a Japanese dimension.

The main entrance to the house is deliberately obscure, which the architects point out is a common characteristic of both Japanese and Mexican domestic architecture. It has also been made extremely blue, no doubt to heighten the sense of mystery. From the road you pass through a forecourt and into the dim blue interior of a sentinel tower which in turns leads into a blue vaulted gallery running roughly north-south across the grain of the house.

From blue opacity you look into light and down the height of a top lit stairwell, where a thin channel of water cut into stone steps terminates in a brimming pool, and a glowing red wall screens the living-room beyond. At each end of the gallery a white bedroom gives on to west-facing terraces. The northerly suite provides a Japanese footnote to the Mexican drama: a simple triangular patio, painted white, with grey stones under a wooden trellis, draws light from the bedroom and illuminates the bathroom.

Architect Legorreta Arquitectos with Kajima Design

Project architects Ricardo Legorreta, Victor Legorreta, Noe Castro, Miguel Almaraz, Jorge Covarrubias, with Yukishige Miyamae, Atsu Wada

Structural engineer Kajima Design

Services engineer Kajima Design

Advisory architect Crayon & Associates

Contractor Kajima Corporation

Photographs Katsuhista Kida