The hotel staff tell me how lucky I am to witness this in the middle of summer. Practically everything at Gora Kadan Fuji, built on a wooded slope facing the mountain, has been positioned to take full advantage of panoramas like these. The new hotel is the little sister of Hakone’s Gora Kadan ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn that opened in 1948 in a summer villa belonging to a branch of the Imperial family, and known ever since for its exceptional service, cuisine and onsen hot spring waters.
Gora Kadan Fuji is giving that legacy a new home, a place where modern Japanese architecture and design combine with culture, tradition and the added bonus of having Mount Fuji on your doorstep. The 39 calming suites combine tatami rush grass floors and sliding wood-and-paper screen doors with comfy beds, soaking tubs, and balconies or terraces.
The property has three villas on site
RELAIS & CHATEAUX/GORA KADAN
I’m staying in one of three villas, Suite Villa Hare (pronounced ha-ré, meaning clear and sunny weather), that sit out in the hotel’s gardens, entered by wooden doors that slide open with a satisfying rumble onto a kutsunugi-ishi, a shoe-removing stone. I shed my beaten-up sneakers and step onto a tatami floor that smells like hay – heady, organic and comforting. The fragrance blends with the eucalyptus-y scent of the hinoki cypress wood that forms most of the structure. It’s an intoxicating mix, evocative and earthy.
My “room” here is many times larger than the flat that was my home in Tokyo for five years. There, I was woken daily at 4.30am to the hissing and clanking of trains getting ready to deliver commuters into the metropolitan maelstrom. Here, I purposefully wake even earlier to a silence that’s gently broken by the first tweets of the dawn chorus.
AloJapan.com