The Hotel Seiryu Kyoto Kiyomizu

The Hotel Seiryu occupies the former Kiyomizu Elementary School on the slope below Kiyomizu-dera in Higashiyama. The school opened in 1869 as one of the community funded schools of early Meiji Kyoto, and its present reinforced concrete building went up in 1933. After the school closed in 2011, NTT Urban Development converted it, and Prince Hotels opened the hotel in March 2020 with 48 rooms. Ryu Kosaka of Nomura directed the design, deliberately leaving the hallways and stairs as the pupils knew them and turning the classrooms into rooms of 42 to 137 square metres, most of them around 50.

The old lecture hall with its high ceiling is now the restaurant Library, lined with tall shelves of books, where breakfast is a set menu with a Japanese, American or vegan main course and a sushi bar takes over in the evening. Benoit Kyoto, a bistro supervised by Ducasse Paris, and the bar K36 are partner venues in the building. There is no spa, but three private baths named Sakura, Yamabato and Kiyomizu can be reserved for an hour or ninety minutes, and the gym never closes.

The location is the point. Kiyomizu-dera is eight minutes uphill on foot, the Yasaka Pagoda five minutes and Yasaka Shrine, at the edge of Gion, about thirteen. The lanes of Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka are crowded by day, but the district falls quiet after sunset when the temples close, and that is when a stay here pays off, ideally with a drink on the K36 rooftop facing the pagoda.