Its floor-to-ceiling windows offer broad views of the garden, which Mr. van Tonder brought back to life and is one of his favorite pastimes. It contains more than 60 varieties of moss and 20 kinds of small wild orchids.

“Nobody thinks that a foreigner can maintain a garden here,” he said, explaining that he became fascinated with moss as a child and developed a desire to move to Kyoto when he realized that he might find lots of it there.

To the right of the tatami room, there is a modern kitchen that overlooks the garden, and beyond a room stuffed with futons. The bathroom has a cedar tub and a small toilet room.

Since completing the renovations a few years ago, Mr. van Tonder, an associate professor in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, has become interested in saving and restoring other neighborhood houses.

In the recent past, Mr. van Tonder said, there were many old homes in the area, including at least 400 sha-ke, or shrine houses, built for the Kamigamo priests and dating to the Edo Period, from 1603 to 1868. Now only 20 of them remain, he continued, the others torn down in Japan’s drive for modernization or because the country’s steep inheritance taxes made it impossible for the next generation to maintain them.

“One of the distinct features of the sha-ke houses are their white facades with black wooden latticework, like a Tudor house,” Mr. van Tonder said. “The houses are divided along the length into two halves, one with a ground floor and another with a raised tatami floor. Each half has its own front door — the lower door serving for peasants, the upper door for official visitors. The sha-ke houses are surrounded and hidden by high clay walls.”

The professor now is working on plans to ask some of Kyoto’s larger businesses and other companies overseas for donations to buy some of the surviving homes, which he wants to use for a small architectural research center. While the Kyoto city government designated one of the houses he wants to save as a “cultural asset of highest significance,” there has been no additional support, he said.