The name gassho-zukuri literally means "built like hands in prayer," a reference to the steep triangular profile of these farmhouses. The design is purely practical: the dramatic pitch sheds the region's legendary snowfall, which can exceed several meters in a single winter. But the architecture became something more. The cavernous attic spaces created by those steep roofs were used for raising silkworms, a cottage industry that sustained mountain families for generations. Inside these farmhouses at Hida no Sato, visitors can still see the spinning tools, silk worm trays, and weaving looms that once filled the upper floors with the quiet industry of rural life. The structures range from 100 to 500 years old, each one dismantled at its original site and painstakingly reassembled on this hillside overlooking the Takayama valley.

By the mid-20th century, the remote villages of the Hida highlands were emptying out. Young people left for factory jobs in Nagoya and Osaka, and the grand old farmhouses they left behind began to rot. Hida no Sato was created as an act of preservation, relocating endangered buildings to a single accessible site where they could be maintained and visited. The collection includes a former village headman's house, logging huts, storehouses, and several gassho-zukuri farmhouses that represent the pinnacle of Hida vernacular architecture. Four of the buildings have been designated National Important Cultural Properties, seven more carry Gifu Prefectural designations, and one holds a Takayama City designation. A single western-style building from the Meiji period rounds out the collection as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, a reminder of the rapid modernization that would eventually make these older structures obsolete.

Hida no Sato is not a static exhibit. Daily workshops and demonstrations keep the traditional crafts of the region alive within the walls of the old farmhouses. Visitors can try their hand at sashiko embroidery, the running-stitch quilting technique that mountain women used to reinforce and mend work clothing. Kumihimo, the intricate Japanese art of braided cord-making, is demonstrated alongside wood carving, tie-dyeing, and lacquer work, crafts for which the Takayama region has been famous for centuries. The museum's hillside setting, surrounding a large central pond, places the buildings in a landscape that echoes their original mountain environment. Walking the paths between the farmhouses, with the Takayama valley spread below, it is possible to glimpse what daily life felt like when these structures were not museum pieces but homes.

The museum occupies a hillside about a 30-minute walk or a 10-minute bus ride southwest of Takayama Station, positioned on the opposite side of town from the city center. From above, the thatched roofs dot the green hillside like a scattered hamlet, their dark wooden walls and pale straw coverings distinct against the surrounding forest. The setting is deliberate: these buildings were not urban structures, and placing them on a slope above the valley recreates something of the isolation and elevation of their original mountain sites. In autumn, the surrounding maples blaze red and orange against the grey thatch. In winter, snow caps each roof exactly as it would have in the remote villages where these buildings stood for centuries, completing the illusion that time here has simply stopped.