This newly built hotel is located on Kiyamachi Street along the Takase-gawa River in Kyoto City. With the Ponto-cho Dance Rehearsal Hall, the symbol of Ponto-cho, and many restaurants in the historic entertainment district nearby, the location allows visitors to enjoy the historic atmosphere, modern bustle, and seasonal changes.

The hotel is a minimal style hotel as a foothold for sightseeing in the surrounding area, offering a total of 40 rooms alongside supplementary facilities like a communal bathroom.

The massive concrete volume, extruded along the long depth of the site, is rhythmically devided by horizontally extending aluminum eaves and gabled roofs, which was designed according to Kyoto's historical landscape. The architectural elements of traditional Japanese architecture, such as the roof and eaves, are reconstructed in the form of extremely thin and abstracted geometric shapes, and the facade is characterised by deep shadows and contrasts.

To harmonize with its unique location between the Takase-gawa and the Kamo-gawa Rivers, the vertical latticework in the stairwells, the ceiling louvres in the corridors, and the paper screens in the guest rooms are covered with delicate digital patterns with a rippling effect reminiscent of the shimmering surface of the river.

The interior of the building is segmented by evenly spaced RC walls which serve a dual purpose as load-bearing walls and guest room partitions, and there are no visible columns or beams in the rooms, which, together with the truncated elemental design, creates a sense of space that is larger than it actually is.

The roadside fence, which runs along the alleyway leading to the Ponto-cho Dance Rehearsal Hall, is composed of extruded aluminum panels arranged in alternating rows inside and outside in the shape of a mountain and connected by a rafter. It is a contemporary reinterpretation of the "inuyarai" (dog fence), found in traditional Kyoto machiya townhouses, or the traditional Yamato fence.

By integrating contrasting qualities such as history and modernity, weight and lightness, cavernousness and openness into a unified architectural composition, we wanted to create a hotel that would be sustainable enough to withstand changes in value and meaning over the course of time, from the past to the present to the future, while at the same time maximizing the extraordinary sensation of travel.