Midget House

Displaying and selling the Midget House at a department store

At the time, schools and homes were overflowing with children born during the baby boom. On such an occasion, our founder, Nobuo Ishibashi, overheard children, who continued to play by a dry river bed even after the sun had set, saying "I want my own room." He thought let’s make an inexpensive, independent study room that can be built in a garden.
He immediately set about development, conditional to the structure being erected within three hours and having a cost per Japanese tsubo of less than 40,000 yen, and so the Midget House was born.
Houses of the day were typically built by a timber contract, but the Midget House was sold as a product comprising a steel-frame prefabricated building. It gained enormous popularity with its novel marketing method, which, in addition to conventional sales visits, included displaying and selling the houses in 27 department stores throughout Japan.
Later, there were many requests from people wanting to add on a toilet or kitchen, so the company carried on with more research and development, and the Midget House evolved into the full-scale prefabricated houses of the Super Midget House and Daiwa House Type-A.

A Midget House is on display at the Daiwa House Industry Central Research Laboratory in Nara City.
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