Six Senses Kyoto Opens in Higashiyama, the Brand’s First in Japan

Six Senses Kyoto opened on 23 April 2024 in the Higashiyama district, giving the wellness-led group, part of IHG, its first hotel in Japan. The six-storey building has 81 rooms and suites, from 42-square-metre rooms to a three-bedroom penthouse of 238 square metres, and stands next to the gardens of Toyokuni Shrine, within walking distance of Myoho-in, the Kyoto National Museum and Sanjusangen-do.

The interiors are by BLINK Design Group, which took the Heian period, when Kyoto was the imperial capital, as its reference. Rooms face either a central courtyard garden, the shrine grounds or the roofs and treetops of the neighbourhood. The hotel was developed with the Japanese owner Wealth Management Inc.

As with every Six Senses, the spa is the centre of the proposition, and here it leans on Japanese bathing culture. There are separate traditional bath houses for men and women, an indoor pool, a pool dedicated to Watsu water therapy, a gym and what the group calls a Biohack Recovery Lounge, aimed at travellers arriving off long flights. Treatments combine the brand’s technology-led approach with Zen-inspired rituals, and the programme includes yoga and meditation.

Two other spaces carry the brand’s habits into the city: the Earth Lab, which runs workshops on sustainability and local craft, and the Alchemy Bar, where guests blend their own scrubs and skincare from local ingredients. General manager Nicolas Black presented Kyoto as a natural home for the brand, a city where sustainable habits and a culture of well-being are long established.

The opening is also a sign of how much the top of Kyoto’s hotel market has changed in five years. Six Senses arrived after Aman Kyoto and Park Hyatt Kyoto in 2019 and Hotel The Mitsui Kyoto in 2020, and it is a different kind of Six Senses from the remote lodges the group is known for, such as its circuit in Bhutan: an urban hotel where the calm is inside the walls.