CRAFTING QUIET LUXURY: KENGO KUMA’S HOSPITALITY ARCHITECTURE BLENDS TRADITION AND TRAVEL

CRAFTING QUIET LUXURY: KENGO KUMA’S HOSPITALITY ARCHITECTURE

Kengo Kuma’s architecture has quietly redefined luxury for the design-conscious traveller. In an era of “design-led hotels” and cultural landmarks, Kengo Kuma architecture stands out for its embrace of Japanese craftsmanship in hospitality, natural materials, and human scale. From serene ryokan resorts to vibrant urban hubs, Kuma’s projects interpret traditional craft and material sensibilities in contemporary, globally relevant ways. The result is a modern Japanese design language that resonates as a form of “quiet luxury” – understated, sensory-rich, and deeply attuned to place. This editorial journey visits Kuma’s key hospitality and cultural works – from Kyoto to Dundee – to explore how he weaves tradition, nature, and modernity into spaces that inspire travellers around the world.

CRAFTING QUIET LUXURY: KENGO KUMA’S HOSPITALITY ARCHITECTURE

East Meets West in Kyoto: A Cultural Catalyst Crafted by Hand

Stepping into the lobby of the Ace Hotel Kyoto, one immediately senses this is not a typical luxury hotel. A doughnut-shaped front desk made of hand-hammered copper gleams under kigumi-style interlocking timber eaves overhead. A large indigo-dyed textile banner depicting a coffee pot hangs as artwork, and whimsical “light clouds” drift below the ceiling – delicate white washi paper luminaires that cast a soft glow. It’s a dynamic space, “bright and buzzy, spacious and colourful,” yet also “a comprehensive showcase of modern Japanese craftsmanship”.

CRAFTING QUIET LUXURY: KENGO KUMA’S HOSPITALITY ARCHITECTURE

Kuma’s design for Ace Hotel’s first Asian outpost is a marriage of Kyoto’s craft heritage with the eclectic warmth of the Ace brand. The 213-room hotel occupies part of a 1920s former telephone company building by Tetsuro Yoshida, which Kuma renovated, and a new angular extension he added. The new wing’s gridded facade – made from oxidised iron and precast concrete – is an abstract nod to Kyoto’s traditional machiya townhouses. Inside the lobby, natural materials and handmade details abound: timber beams inspired by local temple eaves, textiles woven by a southern Japanese art community, and even neon artwork by a contemporary punk-fashion icon. The design is richly layered rather than minimal – “a meeting between east and west through a love of the handcrafted,” as Roman Alonso of Commune Design (Kuma’s interior design collaborators) put it. Dozens of local artisans contributed bespoke pieces, from ceramic tiles by Shigaraki potters to washi paper lamps and indigo textiles, infusing the hotel with Kyoto’s creative spirit.

Despite the visual vibrancy, there is a sense of restraint and harmony. “The thought was to create a hotel that is connected to Kyoto and open to the surrounding area,” Kengo Kuma says of the concept. The design centres around a verdant courtyard garden, intended as a new public gathering space where Kyoto’s past and present mingle. “Through the central courtyard, the red brick building will converse and create a new harmony with a wooden grid system that reminisces traditional Kyoto,” Kuma notes, describing how old and new parts of the hotel engage in dialogue. Indeed, the courtyard’s oak screens, Noren-like curtains and garden landscaping invite the city’s nature and community in, blurring inside and outside – a signature Kuma move. In the guest rooms, custom furniture and fittings continue the east-west conversation: mid-century modern chairs sit alongside tatami-mat lined alcoves and shoji-like panels inlaid with indigo-dyed paper. It’s a tactile, sensory-rich environment: you feel the warmth of cedar underfoot and the texture of woven fabrics and lattices at every turn. By fusing Kyoto’s craft traditions with a contemporary palette, Ace Hotel Kyoto embodies a new kind of luxury – one rooted in culture rather than ostentation. Little wonder that it has quickly become a cultural catalyst in the city, a place where locals and travellers converge.

Kuma’s intention was to design “a seamless relationship with Kyoto’s community,” to make the hotel a living part of the city. In this way, he achieves a feat of contemporary Japanese design– globally minded yet deeply local. The Ace Hotel Kyoto’s success also signals a broader trend: travellers are increasingly seeking hotels that offer authenticity and a sense of place, essentially a quiet luxury that whispers instead of shouts. In Kyoto’s hotel scene, long defined by low-key minimalism as the highest form of luxury, Kuma’s layered approach proves that warmth, craft, and character can be just as luxurious as silence and simplicity. It’s an approach that Ace Hotel’s creative team summarises neatly: “It’s not about being chic, it’s about personality.” 

Ryokan Reinvented: Nature, Craft and Harmony at KAI Yufuin

On a misty morning in Kyushu’s countryside, the smell of wet grass and cedar fills the air at Hoshino Resorts’ KAI Yufuin. Here, Kuma has crafted a hot-spring ryokan that feels as if it grew organically from the land. The resort is built around cascading rice terraces that reflect the changing colours of the sky, with low-slung wooden villas and pavilions interspersed among the contoured earth berms. This deliberate scattering of structures mirrors the region’s traditional farmhouse vernacular and frames views of the dramatic Mount Yufu beyond. It’s hard to tell where human construction ends and nature begins – exactly Kuma’s intent.

CRAFTING QUIET LUXURY: KENGO KUMA’S HOSPITALITY ARCHITECTURE

From the moment guests step into the lobby, they are immersed in a dialogue with local craft and landscape. The floor underfoot is tataki earthen plaster – a mix of gravel, soil and lime – reminiscent of a rustic farmhouse entry. At the reception, a spherical wooden welcome desk evokes a kamado (traditional wood-burning stove), immediately grounding visitors in the agrarian imagery of bygone Japan. Just beyond, a library lounge features bamboo flooring and ethereal washi-paper light fixtures fluttering overhead like the butterflies that dance in local fields. Every design detail has meaning: in the library, an open-air deck overlooks the terraced paddies, with benches made of aromatic shishito grass tatami – a material native to the region, its subtle scent evoking the surrounding hillsides. By reviving such traditional materials (shichitoi matting, bamboo craft, plaster floors) Kuma ensures that guests don’t just see the local culture – they sense it, through smell, touch, and even sound (imagine the gentle crunch of gravel underfoot in the lobby, or the hush of paper screens sliding).

The guest villas themselves are contemporary farmhouse hideaways. Clad in dark cedar planks typical of western Japan, each one-story suite has a humble hipped roof, like a village house – but with subtly modern proportions and thin, elegant eaves that hint this is 21st-century design. Inside, cedar floorboards are finished in the traditional uki-zukuri technique that exposes the grain, so you can feel the wood’s texture with each step. Furnishings and fixtures pay homage to local craft: woven bamboo headboards and sofas, and ceiling lights woven from that same shichitoi grass by a master artisan, shaped like old firefly baskets that once glowed in these rural nights. Even the act of bathing is elevated to a cultural experience – each villa has its own private onsen bath clad in cedar, and the main bathhouse features dark pebble floors and black wood panels that foreground the view of Mount Yufu as if it were a living painting. Come dinnertime, guests retreat to low-lit private dining rooms where washi-paper walls embed local rice straw and bamboo fibres, surrounding you in the very essence of the landscape. Over a multi-course kaiseki meal of mountain delicacies – perhaps wild boar with citrus, or river fish on charcoaled cedar – one truly tastes the terroir.

KAI Yufuin exemplifies Kuma’s philosophy of harmony with nature and celebration of place. It’s no surprise Travel + Leisure selected it among the world’s best new hotels  – design-savvy travellers have taken note of this unique blend of authenticity and comfort. In Kuma’s hands, the age-old Ryokan Inn is reimagined for modern guests without losing its soul. By integrating architecture so gently into the environment and weaving in local craft at every scale, he creates a luxurious retreat that whispers rather than shouts. This is quiet luxury defined: as the extravagance of space, serenity, and cultural richness. A night at KAI Yufuin means falling asleep to the chorus of frogs in the rice paddies and waking up to mist lifting off the mountains – an experience money can’t buy, yet one that design has made possible. “I hope the project will attract people from around the world… to find a harmonious relationship between the resort, the landscape and themselves,” Kuma might well say – echoing his aspirations for all his projects. Here, that harmony is achieved in breathtaking fashion.

CRAFTING QUIET LUXURY: KENGO KUMA’S HOSPITALITY ARCHITECTURE

Urban Sanctuaries: Human-Scale Luxury in the City

In the heart of Tokyo’s buzzing metropolis, Kengo Kuma has carved out oases of calm that embody his ethos of human-scale design and nature’s embrace. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than at The Capitol Hotel Tokyo. Tucked next to a historic Shinto shrine and encircled by unexpectedly lush woodland for downtown Tokyo, the Capitol was entirely rebuilt by Kuma in 2010 as a contemporary haven of Japanese hospitality. Far from the anonymous glass towers that define so many city hotels, Kuma’s design greets guests with a low-slung canopy of timber at the entrance, inspired by traditional wooden eaves – a gesture of welcome that immediately sets a tranquil tone. Inside the lobby, visitors pass through a forest of slender wooden lattices and screens, an intricate grid that filters sunlight and views much like a sudare screen in a Machiya house. This lattice motif frames the soaring space while maintaining a human scale, creating a sense of enclosure without confinement. At the centre of the lobby, dramatic ikebana flower arrangements take pride of place, refreshed with the seasons to celebrate Japan’s shun (seasonality). The effect is that of a modern engawa (veranda): a liminal space that blurs the boundary between Tokyo’s urban energy and the serene sanctuary within.

“In Japanese, this is called shakkei, which means to borrow scenery,” Kuma explains when describing his approach at The Capitol Hotel Tokyu. The hotel borrows the lush greenery of the adjacent Hie Shrine. Glass walls and thoughtful landscaping draw the sight of swaying trees and a reflecting pond into the premises. “I wanted to borrow the beauty of the forest so that hotel guests can feel connected to the energy of the shrine. It is one of the unique things about Tokyo – that even in the centre of the city, we have these peaceful sanctuaries,” Kuma says. Indeed, in guest rooms, pale wood finishes and paper-accented shoji panels cultivate an atmosphere of a contemporary ryokan, with window vistas full of greenery that make you forget you’re in a high-rise tower. It’s a subtle kind of luxury that Kuma delivers – the feeling of a retreat in nature, even within one of the world’s densest cities.

Kuma’s sensitivity to human scale and sensory experience in urban projects isn’t limited to hotels. In Tokyo’s historic Asakusa district, he designed the Asakusa Culture and Tourism Center as a public hub for visitors that doubles as a local landmark. This petite tower (only eight stories) avoids any monolithic appearance by breaking down into what looks like a playful stack of small wooden houses – each floor slightly askew under its pitched roof. The facade is louvred with thin wood slats, filtering the harsh city light and echoing the craft of traditional facades around the neighbourhood. Inside, the warmth of timber underfoot and overhead creates intimacy, while strategic openings offer snapshots of the surrounding cityscape – connecting travellers to the bustle of Asakusa’s streets and the iconic Sensō-ji Temple across the way. Kuma essentially verticalized the experience of wandering through Asakusa’s alleys: each level of the Center offers a different encounter (exhibit hall, café, observation deck), like moving through a village in the sky. And yet, despite being a public building, it exudes the same softly sophisticated aura as Kuma’s hotels, with its mix of clean modern lines and organic textures. The Asakusa Center shows how Kuma’s design philosophies translate to travel architecture broadly – creating spaces that serve and soothe the traveller, whether they are checking in for the night or just stopping by for information and a view.

Global Landmarks with a Local Soul

Kengo Kuma’s reverence for craftsmanship and context extends far beyond Japan’s borders, proving that his approach to quiet luxury has universal appeal. Consider the V&A Dundee in Scotland – Kuma’s first major building in the UK and a new cultural magnet for travellers in its own right. Boldly situated on the Dundee waterfront, the museum’s form was inspired by the cliffs of northeastern Scotland, as well as the prow of a ship, rooting it deeply in local imagery. Its exterior is composed of 2,500 huge cast stone panels that twist and cantilever, creating dramatic shadows that shift with the Scottish sun. Yet for all its visual impact, the building invites rather than overwhelms. Kuma conceived the V&A Dundee as a “living room for the city,” a civic space where people can gather and feel at home. “My inspiration always starts from the place where the project will be… I’m truly in love with the Scottish landscape and nature,” Kuma said during the museum’s construction. His hope was to reconnect Dundee with its river, to make the museum an everyday place for locals and an open arms welcome to visitors. Indeed, a wide public plaza and steps flow from the city into the museum, much like the gentle ramp of a shrine, dissolving boundaries between inside and out. Here again, natural materials and sensory experience play a key role: rough stone, flowing water at the entrance, and vast windows framing the River Tay. Kuma managed to create an icon that is also intimate – a building that stirs awe without straying from the human scale. It’s a philosophy he carries even into the largest of commissions.

Back in Tokyo, the architect’s most high-profile project to date is the Japan National Stadium, built for the 2020 Olympics – a massive arena that nonetheless reflects Kuma’s signature principles. Eschewing the ultra-modern futurism that one might expect for an Olympic venue, Kuma’s stadium is a warm, earth-toned structure wrapped in natural wood and greenery. Timber sourced from every prefecture of Japan lines the terraces of the stadium, a conscious gesture to showcase Japanese wood craftsmanship on the world stage. “The architect said that his stadium design was partly inspired by Tokyo’s Edo-period temples,” one report noted  – evident in the layered, overhanging eaves that define the stadium’s roofline, a motif borrowed from historic shrines and pagodas. These broad eaves, supported by a lattice of wood and steel, not only create a human-scaled facade for the gigantic venue but also function as environmental devices, shading spectators and channelling natural breeze. Kuma’s belief that architecture should “blend in” with its environment rather than stand out monumentally is fully on display: the stadium’s height was kept relatively low, ringed by plants and trees at each level to help it sit gently in the surrounding park. “In the 20th century, to build something monumental was the goal for many architects,” Kuma reflects. “But now, the goal is to blend in. To become one with the environment.”  The National Stadium achieves this despite its scale – it feels like an extension of the park, a bowl of greenery, wood, and people rather than an alien object. For visitors to Tokyo, the stadium has become a new kind of attraction: not a flashy spectacle of steel and glass, but a modern monument to tradition and nature coexisting. It represents Japan on the global stage with quiet confidence in its cultural identity.

From the countryside inns of Kyushu to the civic centres of Tokyo and museums abroad, Kuma’s work is united by this thread of Japanese craftsmanship interpreted for contemporary life. He often speaks of recovering the spirit of traditional Japanese buildings – their close relationship to nature, their use of humble materials, their human proportion – and reimagining it in modern architecture. “Dotted throughout Japan and now the world are dazzling buildings that communicate the beauty and depth of traditional Japanese craftsmanship on a livable scale,” writes one observer, noting how Kuma’s creations, though undeniably modern, are rooted in techniques and materials that date back centuries. In Kuma’s hands, advanced technology and traditional craft are not opposing forces but partners: “he has found a way to combine contemporary technology to bring out the very best of traditional materials and take old techniques to new heights,” an analysis notes. The wooden lattices of his buildings may be precisely engineered with steel for seismic performance, and the organic forms he creates might be enabled by digital modelling – but the feeling evoked is that of something handmade and timeless. Each project is imbued with a “local soul” – be it the tactile mud walls of a hot-spring hotel or the evocation of Scottish cliffs in Dundee – and thus each becomes inherently inviting to travellers seeking a genuine connection to the place.

The Allure of Quiet Luxury

CRAFTING QUIET LUXURY: KENGO KUMA’S HOSPITALITY ARCHITECTURE

There is a Japanese term, shibui, which describes an aesthetic of subtle beauty – not immediate flamboyance, but a refined, quiet profundity that grows on the observer. Kengo Kuma’s hospitality architecture could be described as shibui. In an age when many luxury hotels and museums compete to dazzle, Kuma instead designs spaces that whisper – inviting guests to slow down, notice the play of light through a paper screen, the scent of cedar in the air, the way a building frames a garden view. This restraint is exactly what makes his work luxuriously experiential. It feels authentic, site-specific, and deeply personal. As travellers seek more meaningful, design-rich experiences, Kuma’s approach has only become more relevant. His hotels are booked by those who appreciate that a well-placed window onto a forest can uplift the spirit more than a gold-plated lobby ever could.

Kuma often quotes the profound influence of Japanese craft on his mission. He earned the nickname the barefoot architect for his habit of working closely with local artisans on small-scale projects early in his career. “His stated goal is to recover the tradition of Japanese buildings and to reinterpret these traditions for the 21st century,” one profile notes  – a goal he is achieving. Each new project, whether a design-led hotel or a public plaza, becomes an evolution of that journey. The result is an architectural portfolio that feels less like a collection of ego-driven statements and more like an ongoing cultural dialogue, between past and present, between Japan and the world, between nature and design.

For the global citizen checking into a Kuma-designed hotel or visiting one of his museums, the experience is quietly enriching. These spaces don’t just provide a bed for the night or displays to look at – they tell a story and invite the visitor to be a part of it. You might not consciously note how the Capitol Hotel’s lattice screens align with the forest outside, or why the sunlight in an Ace Kyoto guestroom feels particularly warm; you simply feel calmed and inspired by it. This is Kuma’s genius: a “quiet luxury” that engages all the senses and creates lasting memories without fanfare. In a recent conversation, Kuma summed up the shift in architectural values: “Architecture in the 20th century was about standing out. Now it’s about contributing, blending, and amplifying what’s around it.” His contributions, from Japanese ryokans to Scottish museums, do exactly that – they amplify the beauty of craft, culture and nature. And for travellers in search of something real and resonant, that makes all the difference.

CRAFTING QUIET LUXURY: KENGO KUMA’S HOSPITALITY ARCHITECTURE

Kengo Kuma’s architecture reminds us that true luxury lies not in extravagance, but in authenticity and harmony. In the world of global hospitality and travel design, his work shines quietly – an open invitation to slow down and savour the moment, wherever you may roam.