ROKU KYOTO, LXR Hotels & Resorts

Tokugawa Ieyasu granted this stretch of Takagamine to Hon'ami Koetsu in 1615, and Koetsu moved a village of artists and craftsmen onto it. What he and Tawaraya Sotatsu made there is where Rinpa begins, though the style was consolidated some fifty years later by Ogata Korin, whose name it eventually took. That naming came in the Meiji period.

Roku opened in September 2021 as the first LXR in Asia Pacific, in the southern part of the 28.6-acre Shozan Resort at the foot of the three Takagamine peaks, with the Tenjin River running through the grounds. Clint Nagata and BLINK Design Group built the interiors around the idea of an artist's residence, putting lacquerware at the entrance and karakami paper in all 114 rooms. In the spa the ceramic wall takes the shape of bamboo.

The Takagamine Deluxe runs fifty square metres behind floor-to-ceiling glass, the gardens and a water basin below and the mountains past them, while the Onsen Garden Rooms trade that outlook for a seventeen-square-metre courtyard and a semi-open-air bath fed from the hot spring. Four Poolside Terrace Rooms sit beside the spa with thirty-three square metres of terrace each, opening onto the thermal pool, which draws natural hot spring water from the Shozan grounds and runs all year. Both suites go to a hundred.

That river is also called the Kamiya-gawa, after the paper guild that worked its banks in the Heian period, and the hotel took its name from roku, the word for making paper by hand. The session held on the grounds works selected ganpi fibre, with an artist guiding it.

A priest comes from a nearby temple for morning zazen under the eaves of a reception pavilion out in the Shozan gardens. Kinkaku-ji is a walk away.