Back in early 1994 when I was in the design period of our pond project, it seemed a good idea to build a Japanese Tea-House (Chashitsu). I was fortunate to have seen a couple during my business trips to Japan and it seemed perfect to complement our pond. Little did I know that it would take me until the Spring of 1997 to complete what had taken only a couple of hours to sketch on paper.

As the tea-house was going to be built after completing the pond, I didn't really start designing it until Spring of 1996. Numerous attempts were made at drawing the construction details to scale, but this proved almost impossible, so I took a deep breath and decided to build it from my head, without a detailed plan, something I would not have done when constructing our pond.
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There are a couple of key characteristics of Japanese design that I wanted to incorporate in my tea-house to hopefully give it an oriental feeling. The first being the roof which extends beyond the walls to form a 'verandah', and typically, is curved rather than straight. Second is the 'Shoji', a sliding door made of soft translucent paper and delicate lattice woodwork.
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As the area of ground that I was building on was not very stable, I decided to fix the vertical wooden frames to 9" concrete footings. This would provide me with the necessary strength to take the weight of the tea house without risk of subsidence.
The next stage of fixing the floor was relatively straight forward, using 4" x 1" treated timber, fixed to 3" x 3" timber beams, providing a platform from which to start building the rest of the house.

Once the uprights were in position, I was able to fix the roof which was going to overhang the outside walls by some 30", giving the feeling of a verandah around the front of the tea-house. This was done by building a 2" x 2" frame on to which I fixed a 4" x 1" batten. The battens were going to be spaced at 6" as this was the required spacing of the shingles.

This photo shows a close up of the framework from above.

This view shows how the roof is curved in the traditional Japanese way for this type of building.