Occasionally when traveling, we are delighted to find something totally unexpected that temporarily throws us off our tracks. One such find for me was in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina, called San Isidro.

While in the northwest Argentine town of Tilcara, I started chatting to an Anglo-Japanese couple that happened to live in San Isidro. The woman  told us that she was doing public-relations work for a new museum there, a first for her country. Did we want to see it? She promised we would not be disappointed. So, when I returned to Buenos Aires, I made a point of my first call being the Casa de Japón, also known as the Minka, a Japanese farmhouse.

San Isidro is a relatively uninteresting suburb of Buenos Aires, but the Casa de Japón definitely is worth the journey. The museum also has an off-the-beaten-path feel to it, especially as there really is no Japanese population to speak of in Argentina, unlike those of its South American cousins, Brazil and Peru. The history of the museum and the 20 years of its planning and preparation are as equally enthralling as are its contents. 

After living in Japan for 32 years, owner Guillermo Bierregaard, who made his fortune in shipping and advertising, and his wife Patricia Palacios Hardy de Bierregaard, a banker and descendent of English novelist Thomas Hardy, returned to their native Argentina, bringing with them their extensive collection of modern Japanese sculpture, baskets, furniture and abstract art. That was not all, though. Also shipped over and now rebuilt in all its glory was another unique piece of art, their 200-plus-year-old Japanese house made from gassho-zukuri wood, which having been reassembled piece by piece is just as much a museum piece as the collection inside, which dates from 1868 to the present.

Guillermo Bierregaard’s personal mission is to showcase a timeline of recent Japanese art. “Japanese art has never properly been explained or represented in South America,” he told me, “and we could think of no better way of displaying it than to also bring the house over.”

The collection is both inside and outside the house, which the Bierregaards purchased in 1979 from members of the 33rd generation of a noble Japanese family living in the mountains of Fukui Prefecture, some 200 miles west of Tokyo. In 1984, they decided to dismantle the house and rebuild it in the prefecture of Gifu, near the city of Nagoya, under the eye of Frank Lloyd Wright disciple Junzo Yoshimura, whose seamless join between airy house and leafy garden exudes a peace perfect for the art collection. (Yoshimura also designed the Residence at Pocantico Hills, just north of Tarrytown, N.Y., for Nelson Rockefeller in the late 1970s, which, as does the Casa de Japón, displays furniture by George Nakashima.) “After the house arrived, we came to Buenos Aires with Japanese carpenters, who rebuilt the structure together with Argentine workers,” explains Bierregaard.

Among other pieces on display are sculpture by Hayami Shiro and Suzuki Osamu, ceramics by Nakamura Kimpe and Koie Ryoji, glass by Masuda Masanori and bamboo basketry, the intricacy of which is simply stunning, by Shono Shounsai and Iizuka Shokansai. Celebrated Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi is represented, and many of those with work on display remain alive in Japan, where they are considered “living treasures.” Bierregaard has chosen not to collect paintings on canvas, but visitors should definitely check out the house’s huge structural beams, works of art in their own right.

And the Casa de Japón remains very much a living museum, with the Bierregaard’s residence on its third and fourth floors.

(On the way there - take a taxi from the San Isidro train station - you might see armed guards standing on the ends of streets edged by rundown housing. The guards, it was told to me, are there to keep people in, not out. I stayed out.)