Hotel Kanra Kyoto
Rising unexpectedly amid a cluster of unremarkable houses, this 29-room hotel resembles a spaceship designed by aliens with impeccable taste. It offers a serene oasis in a city that, despite its celebrated mythologies, often surprises first-time visitors with its workaday plainness.
The contemporary interiors feature distinctive Japanese design touches—clean wide-open spaces, precise bamboo surfaces, ingenious storage, and a skilled use of soft, diffused light. The large rooms all have futon-topped platform beds, fragrant cedar soaking tubs, and sliding shoji windows and closets. A tatami-mat sitting room doubles as an additional sleeping area, and a bamboo shade can be lowered to conceal the master bed from view.
Each of the Kanra’s five floors feels like a small village. An avant-garde ikebana-like arrangement sits at the center, and the guest rooms—all with lantern-lit anterooms and their own lockable shoji doors—surround it like houses edging a town square.
It’s a perfect, low-key fantasy of a hybrid ryokan and a perfect example, too, of Japanese minimalism’s warmth and elegance.
Rising unexpectedly amid a cluster of unremarkable houses, this 29-room hotel resembles a spaceship designed by aliens with impeccable taste. It offers a serene oasis in a city that, despite its celebrated mythologies, often surprises first-time visitors with its workaday plainness.
The contemporary interiors feature distinctive Japanese design touches—clean wide-open spaces, precise bamboo surfaces, ingenious storage, and a skilled use of soft, diffused light. The large rooms all have futon-topped platform beds, fragrant cedar soaking tubs, and sliding shoji windows and closets. A tatami-mat sitting room doubles as an additional sleeping area, and a bamboo shade can be lowered to conceal the master bed from view.
Each of the Kanra’s five floors feels like a small village. An avant-garde ikebana-like arrangement sits at the center, and the guest rooms—all with lantern-lit anterooms and their own lockable shoji doors—surround it like houses edging a town square.
It’s a perfect, low-key fantasy of a hybrid ryokan and a perfect example, too, of Japanese minimalism’s warmth and elegance.
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