There is a museum of European painting in the middle of a town of storehouses. The Bikan district of Kurashiki follows the Kurashiki river, with willows along the bank and, behind them, a run of merchant storehouses in white plaster and namako tilework. Standing in that same row is the Ōhara Museum of Art, so modern European paintings are looked at on the same street as the warehouses, a few doors apart.

The district was designated an Important Preservation District in May 1979, and the storehouses now hold shops and places to stay as well. Kurashiki station is within walking distance and Okayama about fifteen minutes away; the ordinary services of a town are all present, so people live here rather than only visiting. The collection was assembled by local merchant money and stayed where it was assembled, which is the important point about it. The museum was not installed later to give visitors a reason to come.

A storehouse is a building with as few openings as possible, designed to protect what is inside it from fire, damp and temperature. That is not far from the brief for a building that holds paintings. Seen that way, a picture gallery in a warehouse district is a good deal less incongruous than it first appears: both are boxes for keeping the outside air away from something valuable, built by people who had thought hard about the same problem. That the paintings ended up on a street of white plastered walls, in a town that had spent two centuries learning how to keep things safe from its own climate, is not entirely a coincidence.