The best hotels in Japan 2021

SOWAKA, KYOTO

For 100 years, this was a high-end tea house – a poetic maze of wooden corridors, sliding screens and haiku-inspiring gardens, filled with dancing geishas. Now it has been reimagined as a ryokan which, like many things in the ancient capital, treads an expertly fine line between old and new. The hotel – whose Sanskrit name means ‘happiness’ – is a clever combination of Sukiya-zukuri architecture and contemporary design in the temple-packed Gion district. Unusually, it offers the hushed reverence of an inn but without the rules: instead of strict in-room mealtimes and futons unrolled nightly, there’s a sleek black-on-black restaurant and cashmere mattresses. It’s easy to miss the low-key entrance: a split curtain reveals a lantern-lit pathway that meanders to a genkan stone threshold. Inside a peaceful tableau with a 21st-century edge comes into focus: creaking corridors, circular paper windows and plaster walls alongside Nordic-inspired furniture.

Each room is different: one has sliding screens with conch-shaped handles leading to partitioned areas, another includes its own tea-ceremony space. Among the decorative woodwork are more current nods – modernist chairs, cedarwood Bluetooth speakers, a graffiti-like scroll. The main building was renovated by architect Shigenori Uoya, together with 100 artisans. He also added a 12-room annex, where the mood is minimal with textile art and angular windows with rooftop views. Food is taken very seriously here. Against a backdrop of dramatic lacquerware panels, La Bombance, an outpost of the Michelin-starred Tokyo original, serves up a delicate interpretation of local cooking from wagyu beef to ginger hotpot. As in all the very best ryokans – old-school or new-wave – an intuitive convivial spirit lives on. DD

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