Park Hyatt Tokyo

There are places that do not ask you to transform them, but to listen.
The Park Hyatt Tokyo is one of those places.
A hotel suspended in the sky, formed by Kenzo Tange, inhabited by the quiet restraint imagined by John Morford, and marked forever by the luminous melancholy of Lost in Translation.
A place where the city is as much sensed as it is seen.
Where each step invites not only forward movement, but a turn inward.
When we were given the commission, the question was never what shall we change, but rather how has time itself already changed this place, and what can we reveal of that silent maturation.
It was not about adding novelty.
It was about discerning what needed to remain untouched, what called for transformation, and what simply hoped to be carried forward with greater gentleness.
The Park Hyatt Tokyo is not only architecture.
It is an atmosphere.
A particular way of being in the world.
A verticality that soothes.
A light that absorbs.
A silence that holds.
We sought to prolong that presence, to make it more human, more tactile, to free the hotel from what felt too austere without ever weakening its inner strength.
To understand this transformation, one must follow a visitor, perhaps the one from the film, perhaps another, arriving for the first time or returning after twenty years, and sensing in every space a different vibration, as if the hotel itself had learned to breathe in a new way.

Patrick Jouin & Sanjit Manku

The taxi stops beneath the canopy drawn by Tange.
The city pulses behind it.
In front, dark stone, aluminum, carefully laid granite, a world that feels rigorous and almost entirely vertical.
Then, an unexpected softness.
A simple wooden bench, warm to the touch.
Above it, a cast glass luminaire, with a dense, nearly burnt materiality, its striations holding the memory of a vanished tree.
The visitor does not yet know that this is the first breath of our intervention.
A murmur.
A quiet signal.
A way of saying
the place will remain the same,
but it will welcome you differently.”
Entering the building reveals a place that feels both familiar and newly awakened. The doors slide open and the lobby appears like a memory returning, a space one recognizes even before ever having stood inside it.
Almost nothing has been altered, yet that almost nothing has redefined everything.
The carpets have been tuned to gentler tones, the light refined and sculpted so that it reveals rather than illuminates, the woods reworked without erasing a single line of the original design. The sensation is not one of novelty but of a place that has shed what weighed upon it and found its breath again, a continuity so subtle that one cannot quite tell whether the space has been restored or has simply aged with grace.
The elevator is a vertical cocoon, a quiet chamber that prepares the eye for what lies above. The three small sculptures that have always accompanied the ascent still hold the memory of the hotel. As one rises, the light intensifies with a delicate progression, as though the visitor were being gently prepared for the clarity that awaits at the summit. There is something almost ritual in this moment, a passage between the world below and the height where silence and sky meet.

The guestroom is where our intervention is most clearly expressed, though never in contradiction with the original spirit.
The black cabinet, once angular, becomes an inhabited sculpture, carved with fine curves and with horizontal and vertical grooves that catch the light of day.
That cabinet becomes architecture within the architecture.
It shelters the television, the minibar, the coffee machine, lacquered red niches hiding a secret lantern, invisible drawers aligned with glassware and porcelain.
It is function and material and ritual.
The bed rises slightly, as if rest needed to be brought closer to the light.
The headboard folds around the sides, offering the discreet protection one seeks when sleeping far from home.
A wide round table, a sofa turned toward the window, a generous armchair create a living space attuned to contemporary rhythms.
The forms are soft, the edges rounded, the furniture resting on bases that seem to glide, as if nothing should resist the movement of the body.
The view has not changed.
Tokyo remains a mineral sea stretching toward the mountains.
And on certain blessed days, Mount Fuji appears like a silent thought.
The room no longer invites a melancholy drift.
It invites a quiet inwardness, a luminous introspection.

We expanded the bathroom, bringing the shower and the bathtub together in a single water space, an explicit homage to Japanese onsen.
The pale stone, soft and nearly warm to the touch, creates the sense of a mineral refuge.
The carefully calibrated light finally allows one to see oneself clearly.
A blown glass luminaire becomes a domestic moon.
To bathe is no longer a daily act.
It is a pause.
A suspension.
A way of returning to oneself.