Four Seasons Hotel Kyoto

Shakusui-en covers ten thousand square metres and runs long and narrow, west to east, where the Higashiyama mountains close the view. A stone bridge divides the large pond from the small one, and the waterfall was rebuilt from its original stones by following the measured drawings the garden scholar Mirei Shigemori made in the 1930s. Design characteristics from the end of the Heian period, together with a description in the Tale of the Heike, point to Komatsu-dono, the villa of Taira no Shigemori. A Jizo has stood here since the middle of the Edo era. The camphor tree is two hundred years old.

Kume Sekkei set the hotel around all of it, and Hirsch Bedner Associates took the 123 rooms and suites, with 57 residences alongside. Washi-paper lamps, fusuma screens and urushi lacquerware carry the local craft indoors, where the windows give onto the garden, the courtyard or the city.

The teahouse is sukiya-style, drawn by the local architect Ryosuke Yamamoto and built mostly in Kyoto cypress, with soil from Fushimi in the floor and the light coming through a Japanese umbrella on the ceiling. Its two rooms are Shakusui-tei and Fuju, which the priest of neighbouring Myoho-in Temple named after the poetic word for a maple.

A maiko dances in the lobby at quarter past five on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and the spa keeps seven treatment rooms, a green tea therapy of its own and a twenty-metre indoor pool. Carp, turtles and herons live in the pond.