Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo at Otemachi

The hotel has no facade. Since September 2020 it has taken the top six floors of Otemachi One Tower, a 200-metre office building by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, connected at basement level to a station that runs five subway lines. At street level the hotel amounts to a red-orange timber frame at the end of a ground-floor corridor. The walk up from the subway reaches Masakado's Tomb first, the head mound of a warrior killed in 940, and the hotel's own directions turn right at it. Then a lift, and thirty-nine floors.

The 190 rooms and suites occupy the five floors beneath reception, so every one of them is a room at altitude. Gathy kept the layouts open, the smallest running to 49 square metres and the Imperial Suite to 283, and let the window wall carry the room: the Imperial Palace below, the city beyond it, Mount Fuji on a clear day. The furniture leans toward the glass rather than the bed, and a round table for two stands in the window. After dark, Tokyo Tower burns orange in the middle distance.

Everything held in common sits on the thirty-ninth, where the spa, a 24-hour gym facing the palace and a 20-metre heated pool with the Skytree standing in its window share the floor with the restaurants. For a hotel with no street of its own, it is a great deal of ground. The lift is the front door.