LOG

LLOG stands halfway up Mount Senkoji in Onomichi, Hiroshima. Bijoy Jain’s Studio Mumbai converted a 1963 apartment block into a six-room hotel, which opened in December 2018. A look at what was taken away, what was kept and what was added.

A Hotel That Is Not New Sits Halfway Up the Hill

The steps up Onomichi’s hillside number about a hundred, roughly five minutes on foot. At the top stands a hotel with just six rooms. Its name is LOG, for Lantern Onomichi Garden. In the evening, the hotel says, it hopes to light the town with a soft glow, like that of a lantern.

The building is not new. In 1963 the Shindo Apartment went up on the slopes of Mount Senkoji, and the hotel’s history describes it as an advanced hillside apartment block. LOG is that apartment reborn. It opened in December 2018.

The architect is Bijoy Jain, who leads Studio Mumbai in India. The hotel presents LOG as his first construction project outside India. According to the British magazine Monocle, Muguruma Architects & Carpenters, based in Kagawa Prefecture, also worked on it with Studio Mumbai.

The work took four years (Monocle; the body of the hotel’s Gallery page).

From JR Onomichi Station it is about 15 minutes on foot (the booking page and others say about 12), or about 5 minutes by taxi. There is no dedicated car park, and on request at check-in a concierge will meet guests at the foot of the steps.

With a new building, an architect can draw any shape on a cleared site. A renovation is the opposite: the frame and walls that already exist have answered first. From there, what did the designer take away, what did he keep, and what did he add to turn an apartment block into a hotel? That is the question of this article.

He Took Away Walls and Kept the Bones

On the first and second floors, most of the walls were taken out. What remains is columns, with the floor lifted on top of them and open space beneath: pilotis. Jain removed the walls, says a text written by a regional council in 2019 and carried in the Japan Tourism Agency’s multilingual database, to bring people closer to one another and to their surroundings.

What stayed is the reinforced-concrete frame, now covered in earth, plaster and pebbles. According to Monocle, the exterior plaster is made from the earth of the site itself, and local residents and the operator’s staff joined in the work as a whole. The skin is new; the frame is that of the old apartment block.

Jain told Monocle that he wanted the original building to be “open, light and porous to the environment”, and that the hands-on work was also a way to humanise the concrete frame. What he took away was walls; what he kept was the frame.

The three-storey building behaves differently above and below. According to the website, the garden and café are open to anyone, not only to guests. After dark, the bar is for guests only. The courtyard works like an amphitheatre: films can be projected on its rock wall and a stage set up for events. The guest rooms and library on the third floor and the gallery on the second are for guests, and so is breakfast.

On the lower floors, the town comes in. The south garden is open right up to the sky, and the sound of trains and the voices of people climbing the slope carry in. Onomichi’s everyday life passes straight through. This garden looks close to what Jain calls “porous”.

The first floor holds the shop and dining room. The second floor holds the lobby, gallery and café. The stairs up to the lobby give a view of the Onomichi Channel.

The slope keeps townspeople away, too. Monocle quotes Takanobu Yoshida, then the hotel’s general manager, as saying that locals do not usually walk up the mountainside. He goes on to say that he wants to draw locals here and, in time, to put the lights back on in the empty houses nearby, and near the end of the article that the purpose was not simply to open a hotel. A garden and café that anyone can enter could give them a reason to make the climb, and the café at the top is a window onto the town as much as an entrance to the hotel.

Check-in starts at 15:00. The closing time is where the sources part ways: the website’s Stay page says 20:00, while the booking page gives 19:00 in its description and 20:00 in its listing (as of October 2026). A late arrival should check first. Children under 13 cannot stay; they are directed to Shimazui Manor (島居邸洋館), another inn on the grounds.

Guests walk through the park-like floors below and climb to the third floor, where their rooms are. With each flight, the building moves from open to enclosed.

Cocoon, Colour and Copper

In the third-floor rooms the floors, walls and ceilings are all washi, so guests are wrapped in paper from underfoot to overhead. Following Jain’s phrase “be gentle”, the hotel says, the aim was a space that wraps guests gently, as in a cocoon. The paper was made by Wataru Hatano, a craftsman from Kyoto.

The rooms come in three types. The one-bedroom rooms (302, 303 and 306) are about 40 sq m, divided into an earthen-floored entrance, a bathroom, a bedroom and a veranda by the window, with a double futon in the middle of the room. The two-bedroom rooms (301 and 307) have raised sleeping areas on the left and right, divided by shoji screens. Room 308, the four-bedroom, was finished with Hatano in the “chigiri-zukuri” torn-paper technique and sleeps up to four. As of October 2026, the rooms break down into three one-bedroom, two two-bedroom and one four-bedroom.

The rooms are described in terms of an earthen-floored entrance, a veranda and shoji screens. It looks like the same hand that took the walls out below.

The rooms took their cue from the former residence of the novelist Naoya Shiga in Onomichi: the sound of ships flowing into the space, the light falling in, the town seen with a shoji screen as its frame. Jain designed the rooms from there, the official booking page says.

Colour was part of the design, too. The third-floor library is modelled, the hotel explains, on Jain’s study at Studio Mumbai, and after repeated trials with the colourist its wall colour settled on a sage green that ties in with the sky and trees outside. The colourist is the British colour artist Kate Dineen.

Time is built into the materials as well. Monocle writes that Dineen mixed natural pigments from local flowers and plants, and that the copper window screens are designed to oxidise in the sea breeze; copper changes colour as its surface oxidises in air and salt wind. Earth on the outside, paper on the walls, copper at the windows.

The hotel presents LOG as a place to explore living by the calendar, receiving the bounty of the land without waste, and trying with one’s own hands what one can in daily life, and on the table it promises the same: visits to local fields and harbours, and ingredients used without waste. The menu is supervised by the food researcher Ai Hosokawa.

This hotel looks past the day it was finished, towards the years that follow.

When you stay, plan the order. See the material samples in the second-floor gallery first, then climb to your room. The walls and the window will read as hand work.

Bijoy Jain and the Work of Hands

The work on LOG was done by hand. The hotel locates the mark of Jain’s architecture in the “strength of the hand”, and says that on this project, too, he kept repeating that human effort and testing again and again produce a great energy that cannot be seen.

Jain was born in Mumbai in 1965. He gained experience in Los Angeles and London, returned to Mumbai in 1995 and founded Studio Mumbai Architects. His Palmyra House in Alibag, India, dates from 2007. At the 2010 Venice Biennale, his “Work Place” installation received a Special Mention from the jury. In 2020 he received the Alvar Aalto Medal.

Studio Mumbai is closer to a collective than to one architect’s office. It is an interdisciplinary group of architects, engineers, master builders, artisans, technicians and artists, and a place for research that moves between materials, models and drawings (according to a page for an architecture exhibition held in Hiroshima).

So who is the designer? The roles that can be confirmed are these: Jain led the design, Hatano made the paper, Dineen devised the colour, and Muguruma worked with Studio Mumbai. What Muguruma was responsible for could not be confirmed, so Jain is treated here as the person who led the design, and how the work was divided inside the studio is left open. Even a building read under Jain’s name looks, in substance, closer to the work of a group.

Material samples, drawings, illustrations: four years of testing are laid out on the second floor, not in the rooms. The answer to what was taken away may be found there. Only guests may see the gallery, between 9:00 and 18:00 (checked 24 October 2026).

Three things to see here

「Open, light and porous to the environment.」

Bijoy Jain, in Monocle, April 2019

Staying here