Kengo Kuma's Capella Kyoto: Machiya Wisdom at 89 Rooms
Capella Kyoto, opened in spring 2026 by Kengo Kuma & Associates on the site of a former elementary school in Miyagawa-cho, is the most fully realised expression yet of Kuma’s argument that a hotel can be made by applying machiya wisdom — smallness, layered roofs, inner courtyards — at 89 rooms. It is the Capella brand’s Japan debut, the third Kuma-designed structure clustered in this corner of Higashiyama, and a building that asks to be read against the grain of contemporary Japanese architecture — against Tadao Ando’s concrete monasticism, SANAA’s diagrammatic lightness, and Junya Ishigami’s atmospheric near-absence — as an argument for craft, depth, and the slow accretion of small material decisions. ...