7 Japanese design hotels: contemporary architecture meets traditional hospitality

A takoyaki tunnel with walls featuring large black circles referencing Osaka street food leads to OMO Base, the communal area. Beyond lies Miya-green, a 7,600-square-metre garden that frames sight lines to Tsutenkaku Tower and Abeno Harukas. The public bathhouse recalls historic sento design, using a white exterior where careful element placement creates shifting shadow and light patterns. In the Idobata Suite, a large Osaka map occupies the centre of the room, turning the accommodation into a planning space where guests can chart their exploration of the city. 

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Architect Shinichi Ogawa designed this 14-storey building in the Osaka Shinsaibashi district, which opened in January 2024. The property contains 11 guest suites across the upper floors, each associated with a champagne house from Bollinger to Taittinger. Floor-to-ceiling windows puncture the white minimalist facade, framing city views and blurring the line between interior and exterior.

Clean lines and a restrained material palette define the design. Rooms measure between 37 and 51 square metres, maintaining a consistent architectural vocabulary despite individual collaborations with different champagne maisons. White surfaces let the urban views and subtle champagne references shape each space. On the second floor, AWA Sushi extends the building’s champagne-focused concept into dining, with spatial design that considers how food and wine interact.

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Renowned architect Kengo Kuma’s design for Ace Hotel Kyoto combines the renovation of Tetsuro Yoshida’s 1926 Kyoto Central Telephone Office with new construction. The historic brick building, a modernist structure influenced by European and Scandinavian design, provided the basis for Kuma’s response. The new gridded facade abstracts traditional Kyoto machiya townhouse elements, using black precast concrete panels mixed with iron oxide to create a warm surface that works alongside the original red brick.

Mesh screens, slatted aluminium awnings and Kyoto cedar create an envelope that allows natural ventilation throughout the building. A central courtyard connects the old and new structures, opening the composition to the street. Los Angeles-based Commune Design worked on interiors that combine Eastern and Western elements, featuring the work of Japanese textile artist Samiro Yunoki alongside furniture by American and European designers. Kyoto craft elements appear throughout the 213 guest rooms, including paper lanterns by 200-year-old maker Kobayashi-type and copper fixtures by traditional workshop Kanaami Tsuji. The upper floors include both Western-style accommodation and tatami-mat suites.

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Shishi-Iwa House comprises three architectural structures that mark the first hotel projects for Pritzker Prize laureates Shigeru Ban and Ryue Nishizawa. Located in the resort town of Karuizawa, an hour from Tokyo, the buildings are positioned minutes apart on foot within a forested landscape. The concept centres on architecture’s capacity to impact emotions and wellbeing, with each structure responding differently to the wooded site.

Ban designed SSH No.01, which opened in 2019, with an undulating plan that preserved existing forest trees. The structure uses timber panels and plywood sandwiching honeycomb-shaped paper, creating a curvilinear form where the roofline follows the forest canopy. Floor-to-ceiling timber-framed glass doors, the largest of their kind in Japan, connect interior spaces with the landscape. The modular construction system of 37 prefabricated wooden A-frames minimised site disturbance during assembly.

SSH No.02, completed in 2022, uses a triangular column-free wooden truss system. Its linear form contrasts with the first building’s organic geometry. Nishizawa’s SSH No.03, added in 2023, introduces black pavilions clad in charred cedar and connected by covered walkways. The interiors, wrapped in hinoki cypress, create bright spaces that contrast with dark exteriors, demonstrating how different architectural approaches respond to Karuizawa’s forested context.

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Design studio &Supply renovated the 71-year-old Tamano Keirin Stadium in Tamano, transforming the bicycle racing venue into a 149-room hotel. The project repurposes materials from the velodrome, converting salvaged steel, concrete and seating into furnishings and architectural elements that give the original racetrack materials new life as both structure and decoration.

Oxidised metals and industrial textures work alongside contemporary finishes. Rooms facing the Seto Inland Sea layer views of the keirin track with water beyond. Cycling references appear throughout the design without overwhelming the modernist spatial principles. Public spaces combine recovered stadium materials with new construction, addressing the site’s athletic history whilst demonstrating sustainable building practices.

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The Westin Tokyo completed its first major renovation since opening in 1994, with Nomura Kogeisha A.N.D. handling interiors that layer the hotel’s European classical vocabulary with elements drawn from Ebisu’s historical landscape as a brewing centre.

The lobby reimagining as an orangery connects to the hotel garden whilst retaining the original 13-metre marble columns as structural elements. New glass walls blur the boundary between interior and exterior, making Studio Sawada’s installation Waterfall a focal point in the double-height entrance space. The work captures the hotel’s connection to the natural surroundings, setting a tone that extends through the guest rooms, where colour palettes and materials acknowledge the district’s brewing past.

Ground floor windows frame Tokyo’s skyline, whilst the top floor houses both the Westin Yebisu restaurant, organised around the concept of rising flames with views shifting across adjacent skylights, and the relocated Westin Club. The renovation demonstrates how spatial hierarchies can shift without major structural intervention, maintaining European classical foundations whilst introducing Japanese concepts appropriate to the Ebisu location.

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Hirsch Bedner Associates created the interiors for Four Seasons Kyoto, set within an 800-year-old Ikeniwa pond garden adjacent to Inari Jingu Shrine. Working with architecture studio Kume Sekkei, the design frames views toward the pond and the landscape of cherry blossoms, temples, and Higashiyama Mountain through double-height windows that connect the interiors to their historic setting.

The interior design weaves traditional Japanese elements into a contemporary framework. In the lobby, shoji paper screens cast shadows across floors paved with natural Aji stepping stones, while guest rooms incorporate wooden slats, tsuzura screens by local artisans, and oak wood architecture that frames garden views. Rather than using full tatami floor coverage, the design references this traditional material through patterned motifs, and meeting rooms feature cedar timber doors carved to represent Kyoto’s four seasons as a nod to Imperial palace architecture.

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