The Ritz-Carlton, Kyoto

Kyoto’s height restrictions did the Ritz-Carlton a favour. From Nijō Bridge, the hotel keeps a low profile beneath deep eaves, leaving the Higashiyama hills to do most of the showing off. The entrance slopes gently down from the street. The lobby is technically in the basement, where courtyards let in daylight and a waterfall drops three storeys. There are worse ways to comply with a planning ordinance.

Heian aristocrats built villas along this stretch of the Kamogawa to watch the moon rise over the eastern hills. Centuries later, the Suminokura merchant family made its base here, and Suminokura Ryōi put his own money into the Takase Canal, opening a trade route from central Kyoto towards Osaka. The moon still has its constituency. One of the hotel’s suites has a deck expressly for looking at it.

The drawing room at La Locanda dates to 1908. It belonged to Fujita Denzaburō, a Meiji industrialist with an eye for tea utensils. A hotel designed by the architect Junzō Yoshimura later occupied the site. That building came down, but Fujita’s drawing room was reassembled inside the Ritz-Carlton. From the table, you look out on a dry garden and a stone lantern. Dinner is Italian. A room with that much history can take a change of menu.

At Mizuki, four private dining rooms take their names from chapters of The Tale of Genji, which makes a dinner reservation a rather painless way into an eleventh-century novel. At his eight-seat counter, chef Katsuhito Inoue takes his cue from Japan’s 72 microseasons. That’s a demanding calendar for a cook. His kitchen also makes bread with vegetable trimmings, a detail that says as much about his attention as the number 72.

On the way back out, look up in the lift hall. The ceiling is a lattice of precisely fitted pieces of Japanese cypress, tucked into a spot most of us pass through while looking at our phones. Then walk back onto Nijō Bridge. The hotel gives you the hills again, and if you’ve timed it right, you can see what all those aristocrats were waiting for.