Park Hyatt Kyoto

Kyoyamato has served kaiseki on this slope of Higashiyama since 1949, and the same family runs it still, seven generations on. The hotel was built into its grounds rather than over them by Takenaka Corporation, which owns it and held the room count to seventy where the arithmetic of a profitable hotel usually runs past a hundred and fifty. The tiled roofs of the district still read as the skyline.

Two of Kyoyamato's tearooms, Suiko-an and Koro-an, stood where the hotel had to go, and neither could be taken apart and put back without losing the thing that made it worth keeping. Both were hoisted whole on a crane and driven along the road at night, a few millimetres of misalignment being enough to snap a column. Suikokan was repaired rather than replaced, its columns rejoined by basara, the joint used on shrines and temples, and the clay that had flaked off its earthen walls reused. Soyo-tei, an Edo-period teahouse whose private room once hosted loyalist samurai in secret, went up the same way.

Arrival is under a low tiled roof. Guest room eaves were set below the upper storey, so the garden sits level with the view out. Tamo wood carries through the rooms, which hold original artwork and look onto the gardens. The Living Room puts a gilded ceiling over a walnut reception desk and an open fire that leaves the scent of tamo in the air, and Kyoyamato cooks the Japanese breakfast. In the Pagoda House the roof runs out into the eaves, with Kyoto laid out beneath. It is the view from a mountainside.