The city of Utsunomiya is the gateway to Japan’s northern Kanto region.
It is home to Futaarayama Jinja shrine, renowned for many hundreds of years
as a site of spiritual power where people and their aspirations converge.
Famous warlords such as Minamoto-no-Yoritomo and Tokugawa Ieyasu visited the shrine to pray for victory in war.

Even today, the power of this site lives on quietly at the heart of the city.

Utsunomiya has residents who express themselves through both their words and actions, refurbishing old buildings with their own hands to set up independent stores, restaurants and bars.
Their interests encompass food, art, crafts, music and sports, suffusing the city with an expectation that the authentic style, actions, and passion of those shaping the city’s creative future will evolve into new forms of culture.

The hotel is both the point of intersection for such new forms of culture
and a gateway that connects the city with nature.

It is designed as a spiritually uplifting social hub where the talents and creativity of local trailblazers—supplemented at times by the aesthetic perspectives of visitors—can interact, giving rise to new forms of original expression and culture that transcend convention.

This vision has guided the creation of
spaces within the hotel:
the lobby, where local creatives gather and their ideas merge;
the restaurant and the café, where locally sourced materials are combined in audacious new ways that reinterpret the sense of place they express for modern times.
Then there is the banquet hall, which serves as a platform for talented individuals engaged in art, culture or sports to communicate with the world.

Together with the city of Utsunomiya and its people, we are creating a point of intersection that encompasses and connects city and nature, tradition and innovation, local residents and visitors.

We envisage the hotel as a social hub that appeals to culture lovers all over the world
within a city of 500,000 residents that produces new,
future-oriented forms of culture and vitality that spiral outward.