Country life: tumbling down a precipitous cliffside site, this compact country house makes highly resourceful use of space

Based in Tokyo, the two partners in Atelier Bow-Wow, Yoshiharu and Momoyo, have made their name with a series of small houses that inventively exploit unpromising or marginalised urban conditions. This work both responds to and feeds a fascination with the evolving character of Tokyo, and their pop expressionist survey of the city's hybrid buildings (AR October 2001) has become a cult classic in its analysis of how architecture is obliged to mutate and improvise in unexpected ways under economic, functional and cultural pressures.

This more recent house on the Izu Peninsula marks a temporary break with mining the fertile seams of Toyko's quixotic urban geology. Weary of city life, Bow-Wow's client wanted to uproot from Tokyo and enjoy the space and light of a coastal idyll. Spread over a series of vertiginous terraces on the edge of a former tangerine plantation, the exposed cliffside site is the antithesis of the cramped slivers of leftover urban space that are Bow-Wow's more usual milieu, but their response to context still is as provocatively inventive.

Part pier, viewing platform, studio and greenhouse, the house is simultaneously part of the landscape while also acting as a vantage point from which to savour it. Anchored to the narrow terraces, a trio of simple timber and glass volumes tilts and slides down the hillside. The upper level contains a garage wrapped in a greenhouse-like skin of cheap, ribbed, translucent polycarbonate sheeting. From here the only way is down, first to the main living volume that thrusts out from the hillside like a pier, and then to a large studio that runs parallel with the lowest terrace. Enclosed by hefty stone retaining walls, the terraces are transformed into strips of garden, with horticultural tools neatly stashed in a storage area underneath the studio.

Using space resourcefully is a recurring theme of the project. The kitchen is tucked into the rear of the living space (under the garage) and sleeping platforms are ingeniously compacted into broad landings on the stair linking the living space and studio. The flat roofs of both volumes are also connected to form an artificial topography of decks and terraces enclosed by precariously minimal balustrading. Interior space flows seamlessly into exterior space, unified by timber decking which plays up the dwelling's functional and vaguely nautical spirit. Light washes voluptuously through full-height glazing and everywhere you look there are Master of the Universe views over Suruga Bay.

Given Bow-Wow's track record of getting down and dirty in the city, you slightly wonder if all this sudden rustic freedom might have a paralysing effect on their creativity--after all, constraints provide something to kick against. However, prior to this project they had designed a couple of rural holiday homes, so had some experience of setting small buildings in big landscapes. And here, paradoxically, there are also challenging physical conditions in the steepness of the site and the narrowness of the terraces, that prompt the architects to draw on and refine the experience of working in Tokyo. Bow-Wow's latest country house still has an urban edge