DOGO HAKURO

Dogo Onsen, one of Japan's three most ancient hot springs, traces its origin to a legend: a white heron, its leg injured, healed itself in the spring's waters. We took the name hakuro, the Sino-Japanese reading of that heron's character, a name meant to carry both the character of Dogo and a sense of the new. Conceived as the seismic rebuild of an aging annex, the project began from a set of very practical questions: how to appeal to a younger, more casual generation of leisure travelers, how to capture weekday business demand, and how to clearly set itself apart from the surrounding hotels, including two sister properties under the same ownership group. Out of those questions came a concept: a hot-spring lifestyle hotel.

A hotel with something more. One that combines function and comfort with the warmth of a place to live rather than merely stay, and a strong design identity. One that respects each guest's individuality and can be used freely, casually, as a base for one's own kind of trip. We wondered whether it was time to shed the unspoken conventions of what a hot-spring hotel should look like, and whether a hot-spring hotel could simply be cool. That idea runs consistently through both the operations and the building itself. The direction was bold enough to divide opinion sharply during the selection process. Years after opening, it is a choice now widely seen as the right one.

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The building's shell was settled early: a low-rise box, clad in raw cement panel, cheap and functional but visually flat. It was, simply, the most cost-effective option, and in truth barely a choice at all. Rather than leave its factory-like, pared-down rationality exposed, we gave it a presence fitting for this place: earth tones applied in a random pattern that echoes the surrounding trees, and a punched-metal screen at the center of the building where, after dark, the logo seems to rise like steam. The curtains in the guest rooms carry the real accent, a color scheme that echoes a gradient running from deep underground to the sky in this hot-spring town: red for the heat beneath the earth, yellow for the ground itself, green for vegitation, and blue for the sky, one tone per floor, varied randomly within each. It is a message made visible on the facade itself: each room its own, each guest a different journey. Together these elements form the design concept we call industrial pop.

The lobby and lounge feel like an artist's atelier inside a converted factory: furniture deliberately mismatched in height, form, and color, large houseplants, art built into the architecture itself. In the bathhouse, a plastered wall in indigo and bengara carries a bold mural by Hidekichi Shigemoto, a sumi-e artist from Matsuyama. We invited a handful of artists, in resonance with the image of "Dogo, a hot-spring town with art," the kind that Dogo Onsenart, the district's recurring art festival, embodies, and asked them not simply to decorate the hotel but to create work integrated with the architecture itself. That is what gives this hotel its atmosphere.

The hotel has 86 guest rooms in all. Rather than the three-in-one bathroom unit common in compact hotels, we kept the sink, toilet, and bath separate, giving the rooms a more generous washroom, and furnished them with pieces made deliberately from nothing but plywood, an industrial material. Together they make for a room that is compact and simple, yet playful and functional. The vinyl records and turntables we placed in every room, born of the idea that art belongs in the guest room too, were among the most fiercely debated elements of the entire project. We convinced the owner to install them by promising to cover the full cost ourselves if guests didn't respond well. Since opening, hakuro has become known as "the hotel with record players," and that recognition remains one of the experiences guests value most.

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Our involvement in this project went beyond architecture: we designed the logo, the novelties and amenities, built the website, and planned the breakfast buffet. Where a sightseeing hotel's breakfast is typically the kind that leaves you too full, we set a different concept for hakuro: guests shouldn't fill up at breakfast when there's good local food to walk to and eat throughout the day, but they should still eat well, solidly, at about sixty percent full, before setting out. Working alongside the owner's team, we led that concept down to the menu, the recipes, and the sizzle of how each dish was displayed, from the ground level up. That buffet, modest in the number of dishes it offers, remains popular in no small part because of how thoroughly it was worked out. In other respects too, we stayed closely involved in operations for the first few years after opening, helping give the hotel its character and its foundation. The hotel's own staff now run the floor on their own initiative, and we've stepped back into more of an advisory role.

The hill in Dogo where Dogo Miyu and hakuro now stand used to look very different. The road between them ran between tall buildings pushed right up to the property lines, oppressive, dim, with no clear line of sight through, entirely the wrong kind of place for a stroll in a yukata. Green landscaping, nighttime lighting, and two buildings deliberately kept modest in scale have transformed that street into something else. These days, it's an ordinary sight to see visitors ambling along it in their yukata. Architecture in a landscape district need not exist only for an owner's profit. It can actively contribute to how a place looks and feels at the scale of the neighborhood itself. Together with Dogo Miyu, hakuro is one example of what that can look like.