These teahouse buildings run to three storeys. Kazuemachi lies along the Asano River in Kanazawa, and the frontages facing the water are three floors high, fitted with kimusuko — the fine vertical lattice used throughout the city. The height is usually explained by the site: the strip of land between the street and the river is narrow, so a building that needed more room had nowhere to go but up.

Kazuemachi was designated an Important Preservation District in June 2008. Because the river side is seen from below, from the opposite bank or from the bridge, the district reads quite differently there than it does from the street behind. Two narrow lanes, Kuragarizaka and Akarizaka — the dark slope and the light slope — climb from the riverside up to the street above, and the names describe exactly what they are: how much sun each one gets. The station is about two kilometres away, everyday services are all present, and rents are on the high side.

A building facing a river has no back. It is looked at from both sides, so the lattice on the river elevation has to be finished to the same standard as the one on the street, and the cost of the building rises accordingly — there is no cheap face to put toward the neighbours. The row of three-storey fronts standing over the water is the product of that condition. Nowhere to expand sideways, and nowhere to hide anything either, and between them those two constraints produced one of the more photographed streets in the city. The elegance was not the objective. It is what a narrow site does to a building that has to look finished from every direction.