Four Seasons Hotel Kyoto Opens Around an 800-Year-Old Garden

Four Seasons Hotel Kyoto opened in October 2016 in the Higashiyama temple district, the first of the international luxury resorts that have since transformed the top of the city’s hotel market. It has 110 rooms and 13 suites, together with 57 hotel residences, and it is built around something no architect could have designed: a garden that is eight centuries old.

Shakusui-en is a pond garden dating from the late Heian period, associated with the residence of a member of the Taira clan and mentioned in the Tale of the Heike, the medieval epic of the clan’s rise and fall. It survived on the grounds of a later estate and then of a hospital, hidden behind walls, and was restored for the hotel. The lobby, the main restaurant and many of the rooms look directly over it, and a path leads across a glass-sided bridge and stepping stones to a small tea house on the water, Fuju, where matcha and sake are served.

The building is by the Japanese architects Kume Sekkei, low and screened in bamboo and timber so that the garden remains the focus. The interiors, by Hirsch Bedner Associates, use washi paper, lacquer and fusuma-style screens in a contemporary manner. The hotel’s sushi restaurant is run by the Tokyo house Sushi Ginza Onodera. The spa has seven treatment rooms and a 20-metre indoor pool, with a treatment based on Kyoto green tea.

The hotel stands beside Myoho-in and Chishaku-in temples, a short walk from Sanjusangen-do and the Kyoto National Museum and about fifteen minutes on foot from Kiyomizu-dera. Kyoto station is ten minutes away by car.

When it opened, Kyoto’s best accommodation was still found in its historic ryokan and a small number of Japanese-owned hotels. Four Seasons was followed within four years by Aman, Park Hyatt, Ace and The Mitsui, and later by Six Senses, which opened across the road in 2024. Most of them have followed the same principle: find a site with a history, and build the hotel around what is already there.