The works are inside a village where people still live. The Art House Project on Naoshima converted empty houses in the Honmura district into works, and seven are open: Kadoya, Minamidera, Kinza, Gokaisho, Ishibashi, Haisha and the Go'ō Shrine. Kadoya was the first, completed in 1998, and the others were added gradually over more than twenty years rather than all at once, which is why they sit in the street as unevenly as ordinary houses do.

Honmura is still inhabited, so the route between the works is also somebody's way to the shop, and the two kinds of traffic use the same lanes at the same hours without any signage separating them. The island also has the Chichū Art Museum and several other buildings; the boat from Uno takes about twenty minutes, and medical care is the clinic on the island. Job listings appear for accommodation and food service, which means the number of people arriving to look at art translates fairly directly into the number of positions available to people living here.

Turning an empty house into a work of art is a way of manufacturing a reason not to demolish it. A house nobody lives in is normally pulled down, and once one goes the gap tends to spread; but a house that is open to visitors gets maintained, its roof repaired, its timbers watched. The effect on the village is structural rather than cultural, and it is easy to miss because it takes the form of things that did not happen. That the lanes of Honmura still read as a continuous street, with very few missing teeth in the row, is largely down to this — the art is holding the frontages up.