The Best Places to Stay in Inaricho-kitagumi & around

The hotel folds so quietly into Higashiyama's narrow lanes, with black-tiled roofs and natural materials echoing the neighborhood's old temples, that you might mistake it for a traditional townhouse complex. Inside is a luxury hotel with airy rooms that sit somewhere between a ryokan's calm and a proper international stay. Kyoyamato, one of Kyoto's most storied restaurants, is on the premises. The World's 50 Best Hotels list has it at number 59.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star
2. The 50 #59 · The World's 50 Best Hotels
3. Michelin Guide 1 Key

The centerpiece is an 800-year-old ink-black pond garden that you can see from the lobby, which sets the tone immediately. This luxury hotel sits in the Higashiyama district, within walking distance of temples most visitors take taxis to reach. Rooms pull traditional aesthetics into something genuinely comfortable, and the staff has that Kyoto hospitality instinct without the formality of a ryokan. A Forbes Four Star property.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star
2. Michelin Guide 1 Key
3. The 50 2025 · Most Admired Hotel Group Award

The 1930s brick-and-arch shell of a former elementary school is an unlikely home for a luxury hotel, but Kyoto has always had a talent for patience. Rooms run spacious and curved in eggshell tones, with city views that do the decorating. Public spaces lean into clean minimalism, a useful mood before heading out to the shrines and pagodas within walking distance. The rooftop bar earns its keep at dusk. A Michelin Key and a Forbes Four Star.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star
2. Michelin Guide 1 Key

A former teahouse in Gion, turned into a boutique hotel that threads tatami mats and shoji screens alongside spare modern furniture without the seams showing. The courtyard garden handles the tranquility brief at any hour, the fine-dining restaurant leans into Kyoto-style cuisine, and the service is the kind that reads your needs before you've named them. Forbes Four Star. Wandering the geisha district afterward requires almost no effort.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Tadao Ando designed this nine-suite boutique hotel in Gion, and the spare timber facade gives nothing away. Inside, tatami mats and shoji screens nod to the ryokan tradition, but the headboards are sycamore-carved, the soaking tubs are cypress wood, and the restaurant menu comes from Jean-Georges Vongerichten. A six-seat bar handles omakase-style cocktails, and there's a terrace when the weather cooperates. The Michelin Guide awarded it two Keys.

1. Michelin Guide 2 Keys
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Kengo Kuma's renovation of a 1920s telephone exchange gives this hotel a backbone most new builds can't fake. The Ace's first Asia outpost holds a Michelin Key and reads exactly like its siblings, meaning rooms with turntables and modernist furniture rather than marble excess, and lobby spaces that function as actual gathering spots. Stumptown Coffee, a taco bar, and a rooftop cocktail perch round out the floor plan for the Kyoto-curious creative who finds ryokans a little too quiet.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Key
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

The only hotel in Kyoto with its own Noh stage, where kabuki and ancient performance arts are still performed, tells you something about how seriously the Banyan Tree Higashiyama takes its setting. Ryokan-style rooms have tatami mats and wooden bathtubs, the better ones connect to private onsen fed by natural hot springs, and a bamboo garden quietly does its thing outside. A Michelin Key hotel, and one that earns its hills.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Key
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

The remote control wired into the wall to operate the lights and curtains was handmade by the proprietor's late great-grandfather, which tells you almost everything about this old-school Kyoto ryokan. All twenty-four rooms are different and traditionally constructed, filled with stained glass, woodwork, and kakejiku scrolls by master artisans. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key. Lone travelers are turned away in high season, which is either a dealbreaker or a selling point depending on your situation.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Key

You remove your shoes at the threshold of your room, Western-style hotel or not. That small instruction says a lot about this contemporary luxury hotel in Gion, where the stone-clad lobby and floor-to-ceiling windows give way to rooms that quietly fold in tatami tradition. The Kamo river on one side, Mount Higashi on the other. The on-site restaurant occupies a separate classical building and has been a Kyoto institution for generations. One Michelin Key.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Key

A 19th-century townhouse ryokan in the middle of Kyoto, rare enough that the Michelin Guide awarded it a Key. All eight tatami rooms are individual, so the layout and décor shift from stay to stay, and the owners have filled the place with modern art and a proper library rather than leaning hard into the antique. Dinner is a multi-course affair in traditional dress, elaborate and carefully choreographed, which is exactly what you come to a ryokan for.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Key

Every room at this 40-room hotel in Kyoto's Okazaki district has its own private hot-spring bath, which tells you something about the philosophy here. The FUFU brand has built its reputation on a modern, understated take on Japanese hospitality, and this outpost delivers it quietly, from the garden-set calm to service that never misses a beat. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Key

Six Senses Kyoto sits beside Toyokuni Shrine in Higashiyama, walkable from some of the city's most photographed streets. It's a city luxury hotel that threads references to the Tale of Genji through its design without making you feel like you're in a museum. Rooms look onto a courtyard garden or distant city rooftops, the spa is the reason many guests book, and the cocktail bar, Nine Tails, runs on Eastern-Western riffs. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Key

Tatami floors in rooms that could pass for a sleek modern ryokan give this boutique hotel its character, even if it's technically neither. The Granbell sits in Higashiyama with a semi-subterranean lobby that flows into lounge and restaurant space, and a public bath that tips its hat to the traditional inn tradition without committing to the full costume. Western-style rooms show the same spare craftsmanship. Comfortable, considered, and a little hard to categorize.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

The bones of a former Gion theatre are still visible in the Imperial Hotel Kyoto, a boutique hotel where 55 rooms blend wood-paneled walls and natural local materials with quietly modern furniture. Two restaurants cover Japanese and French ground, a low-lit cocktail bar handles evenings, and a rooftop bar keeps its city views for guests only. A full subterranean spa with thermal baths sits beneath it all, which feels appropriately theatrical.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A machiya townhouse hotel in Nakagyo-ku, where the Meiji-era woodwork in the common spaces quietly does most of the talking. Rooms go contemporary-luxe but stay warm enough that the contrast feels intentional rather than jarring. Ryokan signatures show up in the bento breakfast and onsen bath, though the bath runs to polished marble rather than cedar, which tells you roughly where this sits on the spectrum between austere tradition and comfort.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

Kengo Kuma designed this luxury hotel to echo the machiya townhouses and temple architecture of its Higashiyama neighborhood, and the result is a rare thing: an international hotel brand that doesn't feel imported. Rooms lean traditional in spirit, with floor-to-ceiling windows and full modern amenities filling the gaps. Some suites come with private onsen baths. The Auriga Spa adds more, and SingleThread, the celebrated California restaurant, has its first outpost outside the U.S. here.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

Hot pink walls against Art Deco monochrome make an immediate argument that this hotel is not hedging its bets. Fauchon, the storied Parisian culinary brand, planted its flag in Kyoto with a property that is somehow more French than France and more Japanese than the concept has any right to be. A Salon de Thé, an on-site patisserie, a Grand Café, and the brand's first-ever spa fill the floors. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

Eight rooms, adults only, and a no-construction zone on the edge of where Kyoto slides into the mountains: Higashiyama Shikikaboku sets its terms early. The owner is an interior designer, and it shows in repurposed 16th-century karakami tiles, minimalist architecture, and rooms that treat traditional Japanese hospitality as a starting point rather than a costume. There's an open-air bath, a rooftop, and a tea salon that earns the word composed.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A cigar magnate's Meiji-era Western mansion, tucked between Maruyama Park's cherry blossom pond and Yasaka Shrine, is now a boutique hotel where the antique chandeliers and Art Deco stained glass make the diplomatic-era fantasies rather easy to indulge. Rooms have wood paneling, fireplaces, and Jacuzzi tubs, with windows facing cedar forest or Mount Higashiyama. The afternoon tea changes personality with the seasons outside the glass.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

Three restored machiya townhouses tucked into Higashiyama make up this three-suite boutique hotel, which POJ Studio fitted out in handmade textiles, lacquerware, and craft objects that read less like decor than a quiet argument for keeping old things alive. The rooms are few enough that the place never feels like a hotel in the lobby-and-keycard sense. Kyoto pilgrimage crowds are close, but inside it's composed and still.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A Finnish designer named a Kyoto boutique hotel after the word for "hut," and the rooms bear that out: compact "sleep-in" or "walk-in" compartments in soft wood tones, shaped around a house-like structure that somehow feels bigger than it measures. Shared bathrooms, supplied toiletries and linens, continental breakfast at the on-site Cafe Aalto. Women-only, which gives the whole quiet place a certain ease. Rates start very low by Kyoto standards.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

The design here is built around a Japanese concept, teioku ichinyo, the oneness of garden and building, and it shows: three quiet courtyard gardens anchor a boutique hotel in central Kyoto, with willow and maple trees filtering light into a glass-walled lobby lounge and minimalist rooms colored after kimono textiles. The subterranean bath is guests-only, and a private bath lounge opens onto one of the courtyards for those who book ahead.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

Node Hotel plants itself in Kyoto as a deliberate counter-argument to the ryokan tradition: industrial-chic architecture, 25 rooms, and a serious collection of contemporary art on the walls instead of lacquerware and tatami. It's a boutique hotel that reads more like a gallery you can sleep in. The restaurant pulls from local farms but ignores the kaiseki script, which in this city is a genuinely bold editorial choice.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A rooftop bar with views across the city sets the tone for this design hotel in Higashiyama, where the pitch is a younger, more cosmopolitan Kyoto rather than a shrine-and-temple reverence tour. The restaurant runs Italian dishes through a Josper charcoal oven using local Kyoto produce, and the bakery turns Japanese wheat into European loaves. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

Each of the thirteen rooms at this small Kyoto design hotel was designed by a different person, which sounds like a recipe for chaos and turns out to be the opposite. The result sits somewhere between a ryokan and a boutique hotel, with tatami floors and shoji screens in some rooms and sleeker, more contemporary arrangements in others, but all of them unmistakably Japanese. A rooftop sky lounge and a small spa round things out.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A century-old villa near Higashiyama's temple lanes, this guest house is booked whole: four bedrooms, one party, nobody else's checkout drama to navigate. It started as a tea house for Kyoto's cultural inner circle and still carries that quiet, rarefied air, with a mix of traditional Japanese and modern Western interiors. The concierge's local connections are the kind that open doors politely but firmly closed to everyone else.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A classic Japanese garden sits at the center of this boutique hotel in Okazaki, the quietly green northeastern corner of a city that doesn't always do quiet. The architecture reads as contemporary, but Higashiyama culture runs through every material and detail. The restaurant leans French in the tradition of Japanese French cuisine, which is its own very particular and elegant thing. A calm, considered place to stay when Kyoto's charms start to feel like a crowd.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

Bamboo, shoji screens, and tatami floors designed by the Japanese firm Super Potato make this Hyatt feel nothing like a Hyatt, which is precisely the point. It's a contemporary hotel in Higashiyama that wears traditional materials in clean, modern shapes, sitting close enough to Sanjusangendo to feel genuinely rooted. Rooms run spacious, the spa and fitness center are well-equipped, and the restaurants hold their own.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A koi pond anchors the garden of this former kimono merchant's villa near Nanzenji temple, and the whole property still moves at that pace. Six guestrooms in Sukiya-style architecture sit across varied blends of Japanese and Western décor, each one looking out onto the kind of garden someone spent a very long time getting right. It's a small, quietly considered inn on Kyoto's eastern edge, and the Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels