HOSHINOYA Kyoto

# HOSHINOYA Kyoto

Fifteen minutes upstream from Togetsukyō Bridge, the most persuasive thing in the room is a tree. Its trunk forks just outside the corner windows, close enough to follow the moss up the bark. In spring the branches are green, in autumn they turn the colour of burnt sugar. From the low seats on the tatami, you can spend a perfectly respectable hour doing very little about any of it.

The journey begins on the Ōi River. A small boat leaves the busy bridge behind, and soon the wooded banks are doing most of the talking. The inn reveals itself a roof at a time. There are 25 rooms, and from the water you might struggle to account for all of them.

When architect Rie Azuma adapted the old inn, she kept the timber buildings and brought in Kyoto artisans to make patterned *karakami* paper for the guest-room walls. It’s the sort of detail you discover once you’ve had your fill of the windows, which may take a while. In the Hidden Garden, slender rows of smoked roof tiles curve around moss and stone like ripples. Mount Ogura, across the river, supplies the backdrop. The mountain was presumably the easiest contributor to brief.

At dinner, the kitchen gives the season something to do besides look handsome. The kaiseki menu changes through the year. One autumn brought mushrooms, sea bream and the last of the season’s pike conger. In spring, a table by the window can have so much blossom beyond it that whoever set the table had the good sense to keep the flowers outside.

There’s a boat back to the bridge, of course. The trick is remembering what you were in such a hurry to do there.