Hotel Kawakyu

OOn a cape at Nanki-Shirahama in Wakayama, Hotel Kawakyu, designed by Yuzo Nagata, has stood since 1991 as the heir to an old inn. Its castle-like form gathers glazed tiles fired in Beijing, 24 blue columns plastered to look like marble, and a ceiling of about 190,000 sheets of gold leaf.

A castle on the cape, heir to an inn

Leave the streets of Shirahama behind and a castle-like building appears on a cape jutting into the sea. Yellow tiled roofs stack one above another, and high on the front a bronze hare is caught mid-leap. This is Hotel Kawakyu.

It began as a small inn. In 1929 Kawachiya Kyubei, a merchant from the Senba district of Osaka, opened a ryokan here called Kawakyu, written with different characters. During the war it was used by the army, and after the war it was damaged by the tsunami of the Nankai earthquake. In 1949 Ama Chiyuki took over and gave it the name it has today. In 1971, during the national sports festival in Wakayama, Emperor Showa and Empress Kojun stayed here.

In 1989 a plan to rebuild began. Hori Sukenaga, who led the project, and the architect Yuzo Nagata of Nagata & Kitano Architects set out to make a building that would last. Construction took about two years and is said to have cost about 40 billion yen. The hotel was completed in 1991 and opened as a members-only hotel. In 1993 it received the 6th Murano Togo Prize (fiscal 1992), an award given to architects.

When the bubble economy ended, the business could not keep going. It was reported to have gone bankrupt in 1995, and in the late 1990s Karakami Kanko, a hotel company from Hokkaido, took it over. Today anyone can stay, and since 2020 the interior has also been open to visitors as the Kawakyu Museum.

The hotel’s own website calls what the project aimed for “a sukiya of the world”. Sukiya is a Japanese way of building that grew out of the tea house, made by choosing materials and craft with great care. Yet what stands in front of you looks like a European castle. That is the question this story asks: why does a castle that inherited an inn call itself sukiya?

If you stay, look up at the building from a little distance before you drive in. Roofs and walls overlap again and again, and the outline changes each time you move. From no single point can you see the whole building at once.

Octagonal towers stand on either side of the main entrance. On top sit bronze hares by the British sculptor Barry Flanagan, about 21 metres above the ground, the first to greet arriving guests. A slightly comic animal at the door of a castle: the pairing says a good deal about the character of Kawakyu’s architecture.

Craft from the roof to the floor

The owner is said not to have left the work to a single contractor, but to have commissioned leading craftsmen in each field directly. Roof, walls, columns, ceiling and floor: for each part, people and materials were brought from a different corner of the world.

The roof is covered with about 470,000 glazed tiles fired by the Liuli Qingzhuan works in Beijing. Glazed tiles are coloured roof tiles fired with a glaze. Their yellow, known as “lao zhong huang”, is said to have been a colour that no one but the emperor could use in China.

The walls use about 1.4 million bricks of 73 kinds, whose design was commissioned from the British firm IBSTOK; at the peak of the work about 80 people laid them. The 45-metre canopy over the entrance is Tosa plaster by the plasterer Akira Kusumi. Tosa plaster is a thick, rain-resistant lime plaster from Kochi.

Inside, blue columns line the entrance hall. Twenty-four of them, 1.6 metres across and 7.4 metres tall, hold up a golden ceiling. They look like stone, but they were not cut from stone. They were finished by plasterers using Stuckmarmor, a technique Kusumi learned in Germany.

Kusumi is said to have spent about a year teaching the technique to Japanese plasterers before they finished the columns together. Build a large column from real marble and joints will show somewhere. With plaster, a large surface can be made without a single seam.

The columns that look like stone and the ceiling that shines like gold were each made by hand, one piece at a time.

The floor was laid by mosaic craftsmen from the Friuli region of Italy, who set Roman mosaic tiles about one centimetre square one by one. It covers about 1,500 square metres. A Byzantine mosaic, said to come from Syria around the second century, is also set into a lobby wall.

Japanese hands are here too. The ceramicist Motoo Kato made a wall of fired ceramic panels, in which a trompe-l’oeil by a French painter is said to be hidden. The building does not simply line up foreign techniques; Japanese craft is woven into the same fabric.

Some architectural historians see this not as postmodern architecture but as “bubble architecture”, because it does not borrow historical styles only on the surface: the materials and the techniques are real. If you stay, step close to a column and look at its surface. Beneath the polish you should see the depth of a pattern made by hand.

Under a golden ceiling

The ceiling of the entrance hall is covered in gold leaf. About 190,000 sheets of German gold leaf, each five centimetres square, were laid by hand one at a time. The gold is 22.5 carat. The work is attributed to a French master gilder.

On 25 August 2020 the ceiling was certified by Guinness World Records as the “largest continuous gilded ceiling”, at 1,056.97 square metres. It is not the ceiling of a single room: the whole hall becomes one sheet of gold.

There are 85 guest rooms, all suites, and each differs in layout and furnishing. Meals are buffets, morning and evening, in Fornace, the main dining room on the ground floor. Two large baths draw water from Shirahama Onsen: Royal Spa on the second floor and Yukyu no Mori on the ground floor, with men’s and women’s sides swapped by the day.

A Western-style banquet hall on the second floor has a ceiling painting by the Italian painter Giorgio Ceriberti, on the theme of love, freedom and peace. Around the building are pieces the founding owner bought around the world: early Qing cloisonné and ceramics, and works by Dalí, Chagall and Yokoyama Taikan.

If you stay, walk slowly between the columns of the entrance hall in the quiet of the morning. Let your eyes travel upwards, from the mosaic floor to the columns to the gold leaf, and you will see the hands of craftsmen from different countries layered in one room.

Visitors who are not staying can tour the interior as the Kawakyu Museum, and according to the hotel there are tours in which a concierge explains the details and background of the building. Guests can see the room both at night, after the visitors have gone, and in the next morning’s light.

Yuzo Nagata and a sukiya of the world

Yuzo Nagata was born in Osaka in 1941. He graduated from the Kyoto Institute of Technology in 1965 and joined Takenaka Corporation, and in 1975 he also worked at SOM in the United States. In 1985 he went independent, founding Nagata & Kitano Architects, and since 2007 he has led Nagata Architects. His work, centred on the Kansai region, includes the Shinbo factory of Minamoto in Toyama and the redevelopment of the Hana no Michi promenade in Takarazuka.

The hotel’s website sums up the wall the project faced in one phrase: “It has never been done, so it cannot be done.” The answer was to realise an unprecedented form piece by piece through craft. The designer’s job must have been not only to draw, but to connect craftsmen and materials from around the world.

Back, then, to the opening question. Sukiya is not a fixed style. It is a way of bringing carefully chosen materials and craft together in one building. Kawakyu widened the range of that choice to the whole world: Chinese tiles, British bricks, Italian mosaic, gold leaf by a French craftsman, and a plastering technique learned in Germany. The castle-like form can be read as the result of that gathering.

The architectural historian Shunsuke Kuragata has written that the crafts of many regions here come together as one, rather than as a patchwork. Spend a night in this castle, heir to an old inn, and you test inside a building just how wide the word sukiya can be.

Three things to see here

「It gathered the world’s handwork to build one sukiya by the sea.」

SUMIBIKI editors

Staying here