Palace Hotel Tokyo

Hotel Teito opened at this address in 1947, inside a 1937 building that had been the Imperial Household's forestry office, and it came down in turn for the Palace Hotel of 1961, faced in roughly 1.6 million shigaraki tiles. No one had put the traditional ceramic on a modern exterior before, and the building took the Building Contractors Society prize for it in 1963. It closed in January 2009, and Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei's replacement went up over the following three years for about 75 billion yen. The tiles came with it.

Rooms fell from 389 to 290 in the rebuild, 284 of them today, and none is smaller than 45 square metres. The windows were laid out in consultation with the Imperial Household Agency, so that the agency's hospital and the Imperial Guard headquarters stay out of view. More than half the rooms carry a balcony, the lowest of them on the eighth floor, looking south over Wadakura Fountain Park. Every room still looks onto something green.

A nambu-tekki iron teapot and mashiko-yaki cups sit in every room, with Jugetsudo tea and Imabari bath linens. Downstairs the lobby's glass wall frames a maple against the moat's stone rampart, a garden the architects laid out to be read as a picture from inside. More than 700 works of art were commissioned or chosen for the building, and the lobby has a scent blended for it from eleven oils. Japanese owned, Japanese run.