The Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation held the property until 2003, when it transferred the building and its surrounding grounds to the Taitung County Government at no cost. The county government spent two years on repairs and restoration, working with the Japanese-style structure rather than against it — preserving the architectural character of a building that had survived more than six decades in a subtropical climate prone to typhoons. In 2007, the restored complex opened as the Taitung Children's Story House, a public space designed to bring children into contact with stories, play, and the natural world. The transition from corporate dormitory to children's venue took seventy years of institutional ownership and two years of patient restoration, but the result found its audience quickly.

Japanese colonial architecture in Taiwan followed patterns developed over the Meiji and Taisho periods — wooden construction, low horizontal lines, deep eaves, rooms that breathe. The main building of the Children's Story House retains these characteristics. It is not a grand structure by institutional standards, but it has the quality that good domestic Japanese architecture consistently achieves: a sense that the building belongs to its site rather than dominating it. The surrounding grounds extend the experience outward. A tree house rises above the lawn, offering the particular magic that elevated perspectives give children — a place to look down at the adult world and feel briefly sovereign over it. A cat trail winds through the property. Slides and open lawn complete the outdoor spaces, creating the kind of unstructured play environment that Japanese-style gardens, with their emphasis on circulation and discovery, naturally encourage.

After its opening in 2007, the Children's Story House passed between several managing bodies. The Taitung County Family Education Center took it on first, then in 2011 the Taitung Story House Association assumed management — a nonprofit arrangement that aligned the institution's governance with its community purpose. This kind of transition, from government entity to local association, is not uncommon for heritage buildings repurposed as cultural venues in Taiwan, and it tends to produce more responsive, locally-rooted programming. The association's name itself carries the institution's intention forward: story is not a decoration here but the organizing principle, the thing around which the building's second life is built.

Taitung Children's Story House sits in a city that has grown comfortable with unexpected uses for old buildings. Taitung City, long considered one of Taiwan's more relaxed and unhurried urban centers, has a relationship to its own history that allows spaces like this to exist without apology for their smallness or their simplicity. The building does not try to be a major museum or an architectural landmark. It is a 1937 dormitory with a treehouse and good shade and the kind of quiet that children, given enough of it, will fill with their own imagination. That is precisely what its founders seemed to intend. The building spent its first seven decades housing people who worked for the state. It spends its second life housing stories, which turns out to be a better use for the kind of architecture that was made to be lived in.