Ace Hotel Opens in Kyoto
In designing Ace’s first hotel in Asia, Commune Design and architect Kengo Kuma collaborated to create an exchange between arts and crafts from the East and West
Two noren curtains, four original artworks, eight prints, a logo, a bespoke alphabet and – last but not least – a vast katazome stencil-dyed fabric sign. Samiro Yunoki has been busy. The 97-year-old old Japanese artist and pioneer of the mingei craft movement has contributed this string of works to a single new project: Ace Hotel Kyoto.
Yunoki is among a cornucopia of around 50 artisans involved in the new hotel, the US brand’s first Asia outpost, which has just opened following months of delays due to COVID-19. The 213-room hotel, located in the Karasuma Oike district, is a colourful celebration of Japanese and American craft, as orchestrated by longtime Ace friends LA-based Commune Design and architects Kengo Kuma and Associates.
‘There are many places where Ace and Kyoto meet,’ says Roman Alonso, principal of Commune Design. ‘They’re brought together here through a love of the handcrafted. It’s a concept of East meets West, with lots of layers and emotional connections.’
‘While the streets and culture of Kyoto retain gradations of history and traditions, various new experiments have been made in an entire spectrum of fields, and the city is constantly changing,’ says Kengo Kuma. ‘I think that the interesting thing that’s characteristic of Kyoto is that the boundary between the new and the old continues to shift.’
Testimony to this is the hotel’s home: the Shin Puh Kan complex, based around a historic 1926 brick structure by architect Tetsuro Yoshida, plus a new building surrounding a courtyard garden with a small selection of boutiques and cinema.
The facade of the new building is classic Kuma, with its abstract medley of angular grids made using a traditional black plaster technique applied to precast concrete. The result is a modern riff on the black latticed facades of Kyoto’s traditional machiya townhouses. As Kuma explains, ‘The basis of the philosophy for an Ace Hotel is respect for the deep culture preserved on the street of that particular city. A unique culture is alive in the narrow streets of Kyoto. During this project, we focused on creating a semi-outdoor ambience by extending the interior of the building towards the street.’
Inside the lobby, the atmosphere is refreshingly playful. Beneath an industrial ceiling of interlocked Japanese kigumi joinery (with large wooden eaves inspired by Kyoto’s temples), are a doughnut-shaped copper front desk, bright textile art, forest-green Shigaraki tiles and mid-century-inspired furniture. Yunoki’s large indigo and white coffee pot sign also marks the entrance to Japan’s first Stumptown Coffee Roasters cafe.
The guestrooms have a similar cross-cultural overlap, with round ceramic tables by Shigaraki-based NOTA&design, tatami-lined bedside tables and retro-tinged textiles by Akira Minagawa, and Yunoki’s bright artworks countered by Pendleton blankets, TEAC turntables and Gibson guitars.
Ace Hotel Kyoto’s three restaurants are further showcases of US-Japanese craft. Mr Maurice’s Italian has indigo-dyed bamboo ceilings, screen-printed canvas partitions by US artist Kori Girard and wooden tables by Mashiko-based sculptor Hideki Takayama. PIOPIKO, a buzzy tacos lounge, has a copper DJ booth, woven lighting by Kyoto’s Kanaami-Tsuji and primal urns by Kazunori Hamana. A new (still unnamed) third-floor restaurant by Portland chef Naomi Pomeroy is set to open later in 2020, and will be an airy double-height space overlooking a rooftop garden, with vast lanterns crafted by Kyoto’s Kojima Shouten plus an art nouveau-inspired wall fresco.
Text / Danielle Demetriou
Images / Yoshihiro Makino
