Exterior, cover image, Canadian Architect

Exterior of lounge, west façade

West façade

Port-cochere

Interior of dining room, courtesy Chuzenji Kayana Hotel

Red cedar siding on northeast corner of hotel

Sturgess Architecture

Background

In 1873, the Kanaya family built the first Western-style hotel in Japan, the Nikko Kanayal, in Nikko, a mountain resort city in Tochigi Prefecture. They built their second hotel, the Chuzenji Kanaya, in Nikko National Park in 1923, on the base of Mount Nantai overlooking Lake Chuzenji. These hotels are revered in Japan for their high standards of comfort and service. The Chuzenji Kanaya burnt down in 1944. and was replaced by a 'temporary' building that was demolished in 1990.

Taro Kanaya, a Doctor of Science trained in California, inherited the family business more than a decade ago. The opportunity to develop a new hotel on the Chuzenji site was seized with the determination to extend the image of a Western-style hotel in Japan to an architectural embrace of the character, warmth, and charm he had experienced in hotels in Western Canada. Based on our experience in the design of the Post Hotel in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, he commissioned our firm, in 1989, to design the new Chuzenji Kanaya Hotel.

The Site

I visited the site, and was overwhelmed by the sense of history, tradition and design that pervaded the site itself, the Kanaya Hotels, and the surrounding countryside. The local stone, oyaishi, was used to build Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Indeed, Wright stayed at the Nikko Kanaya, and legend has it that he designed the fireplace hotel's bar. Tours of the local shrines impressed me far beyond my expectations, and my foreign preconceptions for the project became coloured with an entirely new design vocabulary.' My client, however, believed strongly that his new hotel should reflect a 'Western' attitude, and as such, my enthusiasm for Japanese detail and craftsmanship was tempered by his love for Canadian materials and 'spirit'. The challenge was to design a building that evoked the Canadian paradigm, while celebrating all that was special to me about this Tochigi mountainside site and its remarkable architectural context.

The site is a 'table' of land cleared out of the forested mountainside in the 1920's to build the original hotel. It boasts a commanding view of Lake Chuzenji to the west, and contains two small Canadian log buildings, a cafe and an on-sen. The first view of the site is around a bend in the lakeside road, after passing through a kilometre of undeveloped forest. From the road, the first impression of the site is a glimpse through an ancient grassy roadway in the forest, followed at length by the driveway approach at the north end of the site. The driveway culminates in an entry courtyard, the focus of which is the central porte-cochere. The courtyard is contained on the west by the 150 metre long log structure, on the east by the existing rock garden retaining the mountainside above, and enclosed on the south by the Hotel's meeting rooms.

The long, narrow building form is derived from the existing site clearing, respecting the requirement that no trees be removed. The building has two primary facades, east and west. The West facade, the public face of the Hotel, addresses the magnificent view to Lake Chuzenji, and accordingly, stands majestically on the mountainside, emblematic of the Western Canadian log structure, and with the paired log columns, a built extension of the forest. The East facade, the more private view for hotel users, is in scale with the courtyard, and more reminiscent of local architecture. The 'end' facade, at the north, is proportioned to relate to the numerous stone storage buildings that are found throughout the landscape of Tochigi Prefecture. At the 'centre' of the spine, the porte-cochere and hotel lobby provide the symbolic tower element visible from the road below.

The Programme

Essentially, the task was to develop a sixty-room destination Hotel to the standards of the Kanaya Hotel Company. Two specific requests were made by the client:

1. That we "produce a building design that was unique in capitalising the natural settings of the project site", and
2. That we "create a hotel design that incorporated the atmosphere of a genuine log cabin in Canada.

   The Solution

   The original Chuzenji Kayana Hotel, burned during the war, had a historic architectural charm unique and specific to its site. These aspects, not evident in the 1940's reconstruction, became important for us to attempt to resurrent. Particular relationships of room to view and openness between floors of the old hotel were 'borrowed' into the planning of the new hotel, in order that the new building may rekindle some of the sensitvities that rendered the original hotel a Tochigi landmark.

   A fundamental decision was to orient all of the 60 guest rooms to the magnificent lake view. All rooms have large terraces facing the lake, shaded and protected from the rain by the large-scale verandah. The west elveation is an attempt to be monumental and rustic at the same time, with two-storey skinned white spruce trees acting as columns supporting a third floor trellis screen. This entire 'front porch' is reminiscent, in scale, of oder North American resort hotels and stands in concert with the majesty of Mount Nantai, yet in its filigree and 'crafted' quality will evoke the charm of traditional Tochigi architecture. The confusion of light and shadow of the Western 'front porch' is counteracted by the relative servenity of the Eastern courtyard elevation, a two storey high sloped log wall, desiged to relate to the sloped retaining walls of the local temple architecture. The log wall is punctuated with two-storey glass lanterns' that illuminate the internal corridor at each guestroom entry. This dichotomy between the two 'sides' is intentional, our solution to the sensitive problem of how to design a 'Western' building for an 'Eastern' site.

   Materials for the buildings are predominantly Canadian (white spruce logs and red cedar siding stained yellow, and green aluminum-clad wood windows) with local stone (oyaishi). Canadian wood craftsman Bill Weber fabricated the interior custom woodwork. A Japanese landscape architect who has practised in Canada, Ken Nakajima, of Consolidated Garden Research, is responsible for the landscape design.

   The design for this hotel has been a synthesis of two foreign attitudes to design. It had to appear charming and inviting first, unique, but welcoming. If it is to appear 'Western' to a Japanese, it must not feel foreign or unfamiliar. Indeed, as an International Hotel, it should appear just as unique, and just as welcoming, to a Western point-of-view. The programme called for the provision of strong elements of Eastern and Western culture within a cohesive structure, sensitive to site and responsive to attitude. With the design for the Chuzenji Kanaya Hotel, we have achieved that balance between our cultures that is at once fine and complex, and ideally, the distinction of whether the hotel is 'Eastern' or 'Western' will always be blurred. But most importantly, the building will stand as a singular landmark on Lake Chuzenji, joining the tradition of the Kanaya Hotels as an architectural symbol of Tochigi Prefecture.

   Jeremy Sturgess FRAIC

   

   Drawings

   View the drawings of the Chuzenji Kayana Hotel.

   

   Project Details

   Location		Nikko, Japan
   Client		Kanaya Hotels
   Architects		Sturgess Architecture
   Cost		$12 000 000
   Completion		1992

   

   Other Sturgess Architecture Projects

   Banff Town Hall
   Connaught Gardens
   

   

   This project was published on 1996.09.01.

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