Benesse House

Benesse House opened in 1992 on high ground above the shore of Naoshima, an island in the Seto Inland Sea, as a museum and a hotel in one building by Tadao Ando. It now has 65 rooms in four buildings, Museum, Oval, Park and Beach, and guests enter the museum free.

Here the art does not stop at the bedroom door.

Sleeping in the museum

The idea behind Benesse House is the coexistence of nature, art and architecture, and works are placed through the building, along the shore and in the forest around it. In the museum, Giacometti, Cy Twombly, Basquiat, Bruce Nauman, Frank Stella and Hiroshi Sugimoto hang on the main floors, Walter De Maria has a gallery by the sea, and outside stand Yayoi Kusama's Pumpkin and the sculptures of Niki de Saint Phalle. The museum's own ten rooms sit above the galleries, each with a balcony and a work of its own, by Sol LeWitt, Thomas Ruff, Jennifer Bartlett or Yuko Mohri among others.

Oval, higher up the hill, is reached by a monorail open only to its guests. It has six rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows over the Inland Sea, their walls hung with works by Richard Long, David Tremlett and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and a lounge with a work by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Park and Beach

Park, lower down the slope, is one of the few wooden buildings Ando has designed, with 41 rooms whose verandas face a lawn of open-air works, the Inland Sea and the mountains of Shikoku. Hiroshi Sugimoto made site-specific works for it, and art runs from the front desk to the Terrace Restaurant, the hotel's French dining room. Beach has eight suites a few steps from the shore, planned so that the line of sight sits level with the surface of the sea; one of them holds an audio work by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, heard through headphones.

The hotel closes for maintenance for short periods each year, and children aged five and under cannot stay in Museum or Oval. Benesse House is the starting point for the island's other museums, which OKYTO follows in island-hopping between Naoshima and Teshima and in its guide to the Seto Inland Sea.

Sources: Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Benesse House; Benesse House Museum; Museum rooms; Oval; Park; Beach.