Mampei Hotel

AAmong the trees of Kyu-Karuizawa, the Alps Wing, a timber main building designed by Gonkuro Kume, has stood since 1936. It wraps an earthquake-resistant timber frame, developed from his studies in Germany, in the form of a mountain lodge. Renovated in 2024, it still greets guests with a fireplace and a stained-glass turtle from 1936.

The third main building, deep in the woods

In Kyu-Karuizawa, follow a road through the trees. A timber building with a red gabled roof comes into view, its walls marked by a grid of wooden framing. This is the Alps Wing, the main building of the Mampei Hotel. It was completed in 1936 and registered as a national Tangible Cultural Property in 2018.

The hotel itself is older still. In 1764, in Karuizawa, then a post town on the Nakasendo highway, a man of the Sato family opened an inn called Kameya. In 1886 the Canadian missionary Alexander Croft Shaw and James Main Dixon, a teacher at the Imperial University, spent a summer there. In 1894, with foreign guests now staying for long periods, the first Sato Mampei turned Kameya into a Western-style hotel and renamed it the Kameya Hotel. The hotel counts this as its founding year.

In 1902 the hotel moved from the main street of old Karuizawa to its present site in Sakuranosawa and was newly built. In 1935 that main building was taken down and rebuilding began; the result, finished the following year, is today’s Alps Wing. It is said to be the hotel’s third main building. That same year the hotel changed the way it wrote its name, from the older character 萬平 to 万平.

The architect was Gonkuro Kume, who studied architecture in Germany and researched ways to make Japanese timber houses stronger in earthquakes. Yet the building he made looks like a European mountain lodge. The hotel and its owner Mori Trust describe the exterior as “half-timber style”. Half-timbering is a traditional way of building, found in England, Germany and elsewhere, in which the wooden frame of posts and beams shows on the outside of the wall.

An architect back from Germany built, in a mountain summer resort, a main building that looks like a lodge with its timbers on show. Is it a copy of the West, or something else? That is the question this story asks.

If you stay, stop for a moment before going in and look up at the front of the building. By the entrance is the sign “MAMPEI HOTEL”, said to have hung there since the hotel’s early days. The name of a hotel more than 130 years old and a timber main building almost 90 years old share the same view.

Small posts, bundled together

The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 destroyed many timber buildings. In the early Showa years that followed, Kume devised what is called the Kume-style earthquake-resistant timber frame. Slender posts are paired, two at a time, clamping horizontal members such as the sill and the girders at first-floor level, and fixed with bolts. These pairs of posts stand close together, and diagonal braces are added at key points.

According to research on the method, Kume set out three ideas: make the joints of the frame rigid, keep the building light by using slender members, and keep the centre of gravity low. The heavier a building is, the greater the force an earthquake puts on it. Kume is said to have likened his frame to a birdcage — light, yet rigid. In his buildings the posts were often only about 4.5 to 6 cm square. As a rule, the frame was then covered on the outside with a thick wall of timber lath, mortar and plaster.

A list of Kume’s works built with this method, compiled in research at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, includes the “Karuizawa Mampei Hotel Alps Wing” of 1936. Mori Trust and the hotel say the Alps Wing is valued as a building that attempted to modernise Japanese timber architecture.

On the outside, meanwhile, the building is described as a blend of East and West, combining honmune-zukuri, the broad-gabled farmhouse style of Shinshu (today’s Nagano), with half-timbering. The hotel calls its exterior one that harmonises with the Karuizawa landscape. The frame followed reasoning Kume had sharpened in Germany; the face was fitted to the Karuizawa woods.

The structure sits inside the walls, so a guest never sees it. Even so, a three-storey timber building from almost 90 years ago is still putting up guests. That in itself is one answer to the question of whether Kume’s method worked.

The 2024 renovation set out to follow the original design and colours as closely as possible. Within that, ageing parts were strengthened, and insulation, waterproofing, sound insulation and accessibility were improved. It was a renovation to keep a timber cultural property working as a hotel today.

A stay that begins under a stained-glass turtle

Through the entrance of the Alps Wing lies the lobby. At its centre is a fireplace from 1936. Around it stands furniture used before the renovation, and the red of the carpet is said to have been copied directly from the colour it had before. The stained glass set into a screen also dates from the building’s construction.

Climb the stairs beside the front desk and light falls through a stained-glass turtle. It recalls Kameya, “turtle house”, the inn from which the hotel grew, and is one of the hotel’s symbols. All the stained glass in the lobby is said to be unchanged since 1936.

In the main dining room on the ground floor, look up at the ceiling. It is an oriage-gotenjo, a coffered ceiling of timber in a grid, raised a step at its centre. In the renovation some of the original timber was reused, and parts that were stained or peeling were replaced. Along the windows runs stained glass from 1936. Against the backdrop of Mount Asama, it is said to compare the Karuizawa of the early Showa years with that of the Edo period. At mealtimes a chime is still rung to announce dinner, a custom said to date from the days when rooms had no clocks.

It wears the face of a Western mountain lodge; inside, Japanese timber building was trying to become modern.

There are 12 rooms: four Classic rooms (36 m²), seven Classic Premier rooms (48 m²) and one Grand Classic (57 m²), a corner room on the entrance side. They share round pendant lamps, glass shoji screens, claw-foot bathtubs and furniture in Karuizawa-bori, a traditional local style of carving. Some bathtubs and windows, which recall a Japanese inn, were kept from before the renovation. The windows still close with old-fashioned screw locks.

From 1977 to 1979, John Lennon stayed in the Alps Wing with his family every summer. He spent his resort summers in rooms where Japan and the West are mixed together.

If you stay, look up at the stained-glass turtle on the stairs during the day, and at night take a seat in the main dining room in front of the Mount Asama glass. The glass dates from 1936 in both places, but it should look different with daylight passing through it and with the room’s lamps shining on it at night.

The renovation was carried out to mark the hotel’s 130th anniversary. The hotel closed on 4 January 2023 for about a year and a half. Azusa Sekkei designed the work and Shimizu Corporation and others built it, with DESIGN STUDIO CROW involved in the design of the Alps Wing renovation. Part of the hotel had a soft opening on 16 August 2024; after a temporary closure from 24 September, the whole hotel had its grand opening on 2 October. The rebuilt Atago Wing (30 rooms) has a bath fed by Shiozawa hot spring water in every room. With the Usui Wing (44 rooms), the hotel now has 86 rooms in all.

Gonkuro Kume and the modernising of timber

Gonkuro Kume was born in Tokyo in 1895, the son of the civil engineer and businessman Taminosuke Kume. In 1922 he went to Germany to study chemistry, but as foreigners were not allowed to study it there, he is said to have turned to architecture. He entered the architecture department of the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart in 1923. In 1929 he received a doctorate for a thesis on the improvement of the Japanese house.

Back in Japan the same year, Kume opened an architectural office with Jin Watanabe, the architect of Hotel New Grand in Yokohama. In 1932 he set up his own office, the origin of today’s Kume Sekkei. In the mid-1930s he designed one hotel after another: an annexe for the Nikko Kanaya Hotel (1935), the Fuji View Hotel (1936) and the Alps Wing.

Back, then, to the question. The lodge-like look was an outward answer, fitted to the landscape of Karuizawa. Inside it, Kume used what he had learned in Germany to make Japanese timber building lighter, stiffer and stronger against earthquakes. The Alps Wing is not a copy of the West. It is an attempt to make Japanese timber building modern, wrapped in the form of a summer-resort lodge.

If you have stayed at Hotel New Grand, you can compare two different answers from two architects who started out in the same office. In the port city, Eastern ornament was laid over a Western building of reinforced concrete; in the woods, the timber frame itself was made new. That difference is worth a trip into the trees of Karuizawa.

Three things to see here

「A frame from German reasoning, a face from the Karuizawa woods.」

SUMIBIKI editors

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