These two homes reach toward one another to create a beautiful modern archway

This lovely arched structure is actually two homes, composed together to create a unique archway that stretches across this residential street.

Japan-based Naf Architect & Design created this unique duo of buildings to stand together as one, although they do not touch. The arch created where one building ends and the other begins serves as an eye-catching architectural element to drivers-by.

Akio Nakasa designed the pair of buildings, situated near a Japanese tea garden. Despite being two separate buildings, the project is known as the Arch Wall House. The two halves meet at the apex of an arch, but the buildings do not touch and are not designed as a mirror image of one another. Rather, they are each unique in shape and layout, conforming instead to the landscape.

The smaller, lower-roofed house is a single story structure, designed with lots of open space in the interior, giving it a greater sense of scale than it actually measures. The larger house contains two stories, with an open mezzanine level to help distribute natural light throughout the interior.

The relationship between the homes doesn’t end with being two halves of an almost-whole. The pair was built to house three generations of the same family, with a single grandmother living on one side, while a couple and their child occupies the other.