The building went up in 1929, when Taichung was a prosperous colonial city growing outward from its Japanese-planned grid. Miyahara Takeo's residence — known then as the Miyahara Residence — occupied a plot in what is now the North District, within easy walking distance of Taichung Station. The design is a Japanese-style mansion of two floors, with the careful attention to proportion and material that characterized well-funded domestic construction of the late Taishō and early Shōwa periods. Whether Miyahara Takeo lived here long or comfortably, history does not record in detail. What it does record is the moment the mansion changed hands: 1945, when Taiwan's administration passed from Japan to the Republic of China. The Miyahara Residence became the property of the Taichung City Government, and its function changed entirely.

For decades after 1945, the building served as the official residence of Taichung's mayors — a role that suited both its architectural dignity and its location near the administrative core of the city. The name shifted: the Miyahara Residence became the Taichung Mayor's House, the name by which it is still known. Successive mayors of a changing city occupied these rooms — through the early Republic of China period, through the decades of martial law, through the gradual democratization of Taiwanese governance that accelerated in the 1980s and culminated in direct municipal elections. The building itself remained largely as Miyahara Takeo had built it. In 2002, it was officially declared a historical building, a designation that recognized its architectural and cultural value and placed it under protective status.

In 2004, the Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Taichung City Government took the next step. The building stopped being a private or official residence and became a public arts and cultural center, opened for exhibitions and performances. The decision reflected a broader trend in Taiwan during the early 2000s: the conversion of Japanese colonial-era structures from administrative use to cultural programming, giving the public access to buildings that had previously served only institutional functions. The Taichung Mayor's House now operates as a venue where art exhibitions cycle through the rooms, performances use the property's spatial qualities, and visitors can move through a space that carries the weight of the city's layered history without requiring prior knowledge of any of it.

The building sits in Taichung's North District at approximately 24.149°N, 120.687°E, within comfortable walking distance north of Taichung Station — one of the railway hubs that defines central Taichung's orientation. The neighborhood around it is a mix of older commercial and residential structures and the typical Taiwanese urban texture of small shops, motorcycles, and street-level activity. The mansion itself provides a point of contrast: quieter, older, more deliberate in its proportions than the street around it. Stepping through its gate, you pass through something of a temporal threshold. The building has now housed an optometrist, a series of mayors, and an arts center. Whatever it becomes next, it has already shown a remarkable capacity for reinvention.