Perched on Yakushiyama — Healing Buddha's Mountain — above the ancient hot spring town of Yamashiro Onsen in Kaga, Beniya Mukayu began as a traditional inn in 1928 and has spent the past three decades becoming something quietly extraordinary. The transformation is the work of architect Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama of AMORPHE, who began reshaping the property in 1996, and designer Kenya Hara, whose philosophy of emptiness and white runs through every surface. Board-formed concrete walls meet pale maple floors in the guestrooms, where a full-height window frames the forest canopy and steps down to a private open-air hot spring bath set flush with the ground. The lounge presents a different kind of severity: polished concrete floors, floor-to-ceiling glazing dissolved entirely into the surrounding zelkova and maple, and a scatter of mid-century armchairs in off-white linen that suggest a curator's eye more than a decorator's hand. The 16 rooms hold both registers of the property's history without forcing a resolution. Tatami suites with shoji screens, lacquered low tables, and textured earthen plaster walls carry the warmth of the older inn, while the newer concrete volumes push the material palette toward something closer to contemporary Japanese art architecture. The communal onsen bath, lined in dark-veined stone with a cedar ceiling angled above a single panoramic window, frames one old forest tree with the precision of a hanging scroll. The whole property moves at the pace the mountain sets.

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