Ace Hotel Kyoto

Ace Hotel Kyoto, which opened in 2020 as the brand's first property in Asia, occupies a site in the Nakagyo-ku area near the intersection of Shijo and Karasuma — one of Kyoto's central commercial arteries. The building combines preserved elements of the original structure with new interventions by Kengo Kuma, whose architectural practice has become one of the most significant mediators between Japanese material culture and contemporary global building culture. The collaboration between the Portland-born lifestyle hotel brand and the Japanese architect produced something that is neither entirely Ace nor entirely Kuma but a productive conversation between the two.

Ace Hotel's identity is built around the belief that hotels should be embedded in local cultural life rather than insulated from it. Music, art, independent business tenants, and programming that serves the neighborhood as much as the guest have characterized the brand's properties from New York and Los Angeles to London and Chicago. In Kyoto, the challenge was to apply this philosophy to a city that has its own extremely well-developed cultural identity — and to do so without the brash self-assertion that would be tone-deaf in such a context.

The result is a hotel that feels distinctly Kyoto-inflected in its material palette and spatial restraint while maintaining the energy and accessibility that the Ace brand requires. The bar and restaurant are designed as social spaces with visibility from the street; the lobby functions as a meeting point for guests and local creatives. Traditional craft references are woven through the interior without becoming decorative clichés.

For travelers who find Kyoto's traditional ryokan and international luxury hotel options equally misaligned with their sensibility — too formal on one side, too indifferent to local context on the other — Ace Hotel Kyoto offers a genuinely different proposition: contemporary, engaged, and present in the city without dominating it.