The Shinmonzen

Shinmonzen-dori is Gion's street of antique and art dealers, and the hotel named after it shows the street the face it expects: dark timber lattice over paper screens that glow amber at dusk, and an indigo curtain at the door brushed with a single S. Tadao Ando designed it, new in 2021, and it shows its four floors only from behind, where black slatted balconies stack up over the stone wall of the Shirakawa canal, one for each suite. The suites are named after materials, Washi for paper and Urushi for lacquer, though in seven of them the material that counts is hinoki, the cypress of the bathtub, whatever the door says. Remi Tessier's interiors are pale wood and white linen behind shoji, the art runs to Louise Bourgeois and Hiroshi Sugimoto, and three suites are tatami rooms with futons. Ask for Suisho, which adds a terrace of 25 square metres up among the rooftops, with sun loungers and a dining table.

Recommended for anyone who wants Kyoto on foot and dinner taken seriously. Yasaka Shrine is about seven minutes' walk, Kiyomizu-dera about nineteen, the last of it past the teahouses of Sannenzaka, and Nishiki Market eleven the other way. Anyone who would rather be pulled can take one of the hotel's rickshaw tours from the Tatsumi bridge. Breakfast is included, at Jean-Georges, Vongerichten's first restaurant in Kyoto. Children are welcome, but with no pool and no club this is a Kyoto for those old enough to sit through a tea ceremony, which the hotel arranges at Korin-in. It also books private meditation at Ryosoku-in, in the grounds of Kenninji, Kyoto's oldest Zen temple. With more than 3,000 bottles in the cellar at Jean-Georges, that one is best kept for the morning.