From the window of my room at the Capella Kyoto hotel, the Gion Kaburenjo Theater rises in dark timber, crowned by a traditional tile roof. Along the stone-paved lane that runs between the two buildings, a young woman passes by in jeans and a cardigan with a canvas bag over her shoulder. Only her distinctive, rounded coiffure — sculpted from her own hair and worn unchanged for a full year — gives her away as a maiko (apprentice geisha) on her way home from practice.

Kyoto’s Miyagawacho is one of just five remaining kagai, or geisha districts, in a city that has spent centuries perfecting the art of preservation. For all its mystique, it is a working neighborhood and newly home to Capella Kyoto, which occupies the site of Shinmichi Elementary School between the Kaburenjo theatre and Kenninji, Kyoto's oldest Zen Buddhist temple.

Architect Kengo Kuma was commissioned with a major three-part development along Shinmichi Street: the hotel itself, the restored Kaburenjo — the training ground of Kyoto's geiko (a regional term for geisha) and maiko, and still a working theater — and a new community center. The three buildings share a coherent vocabulary of carved timber and slatted screens; the theater's gable, with its characteristic concave-convex curve, is echoed in the awning above the hotel's inner courtyard. The paved walkway between hotel and theater, where I first glimpsed the off-duty maiko, was laid under the direction of NTT Urban Development — the owner of Capella Kyoto — and opened as a public thoroughfare to encourage foot traffic between the buildings.

Adblock test (Why?)