Kengo Kuma's architecture has long pursued an argument with modernity — that mass and weight are not architecture's only tools, that wood and light and carefully placed shadow can do what concrete cannot. Banyan Tree Higashiyama Kyoto, which opened in August 2024 as the brand's first Japanese property, is among his most precise articulations of that position. The four-floor, 52-room structure steps up a forested hillside in Higashiyama Ward, its dark-tiled rooflines and cypress timber screens in direct conversation with the neighbourhood's centuries-old temple architecture. Generous overhanging eaves shade stacked lattice facades that filter dusk light into something close to candlelight, while dry-stone retaining walls at the approach read as though they predate the building by generations. Inside, Yukio Hashimoto's interiors translate the same sensibility into rooms where the boundary between sleeping and bathing dissolves through sliding shoji screens, Hiba wood soaking tubs, and tatami surfaces that absorb both sound and daylight equally. Gold leaf accents appear as wall panels that catch light obliquely, warming the otherwise pale ash and cream palette without asserting themselves. The bar moves in a different direction entirely: dark-stained cedar ceilings, black granite countertops, and leather club chairs in a deliberately nocturnal room, parquet flooring and candlelight shifting the mood from meditative to intimate. Most singular among the property's features is its own Noh stage set within the garden, a cypress pavilion raised over a reflecting pond that serves as both cultural venue and the hotel's most concentrated piece of architecture.