HOTEL THE MITSUI KYOTO, a Luxury Collection Hotel & Spa

The gate went up in 1703 for the Kajiimiya court, the Tendai household that is now Sanzen-in, and it spent years back in Ohara before reaching this address in 1935. Carpenters from Fukui took it down into roughly a thousand pieces and stood four fifths of the old timber up again. It was registered as a cultural property in 2021, the second building in the Mitsui group to be listed.

Takahira Mitsui chose the ground because Nijo Castle stood next door, and his line held it for more than two hundred and fifty years. Shunsaku Miyagi rebuilt their garden at the centre of the property, some 1,300 square metres of it, working the old estate's stone lanterns and rocks back in. The path from the gate runs through bamboo before it reaches the lobby, where a wall of angled timber slats stands in for a hedge and a ceramic by Yukiya Izumita sits in raked sand. SHIKI-NO-MA reconstructs the okusho-in of the old house in Japanese cypress.

André Fu took the tearoom as his model for the 160 rooms, which run to custom walnut cut with interlocking joints, washi shades made by local artisans, and woven wall panels by Jotaro Saito, who comes out of a family of Kyoto kimono dyers. Every bathtub is rough-cut stone, long enough to lie down in. The spring the hotel draws on lies a thousand metres straight below the property, feeding a thermal pool where bathers wear swimsuits and, in the two Onsen Suites, an outdoor bath off a private garden. One group of guests a morning walks into Nijo Castle fifteen minutes before it opens to anyone else. The Nijo rooms look straight at it.