The Okura Tokyo

The main lobby is on the ground floor of the Prestige Tower and it is not a corridor with a reception desk in it. It is a double-height room designed to be sat in, with sunken seating clusters, the lantern clusters overhead, and a screen wall of interlocking shapes derived from the plum blossom. Everything is low. The whole composition is built at a Japanese floor-level eye height rather than a European standing one, which is why photographs of it never work.

You do not have to be a guest. The lobby lounge serves tea, coffee and drinks to anyone who walks in and sits down, and that is the correct way to see the room: order something, sit in one of the low chairs, and look up. It is not cheap for a coffee and it is very cheap for access to a landmark.

The hotel also runs a design tour of the lobby’s symbolism, which is worth knowing about if the architecture is the reason you came. Details and availability sit on the hotel’s own site.

The Okura is really two hotels sharing a name and a lobby. The Okura Prestige Tower is the large one: forty-one floors, the bigger restaurant list, the pool, the conference business, and the more conventional international luxury experience.

The Okura Heritage Wing is the smaller building: fewer rooms, a separate and quieter entrance, a more explicitly Japanese material palette, and a level of staffing that produces a completely different atmosphere. Guests there get their own lounge. If you are choosing between them for a special stay, Heritage is the one with the soul; Prestige is the one with the facilities.

Rates are dynamic and the hotel does not publish a fixed nightly figure, so we do not print one. Check the hotel’s own booking pages for your dates.

Toranomon is an odd and rather good address: embassies, low traffic, steep little streets, and almost no tourists. It is quiet in a way that central Tokyo mostly is not. The nearest stations are Kamiyacho and Roppongi-itchome, and Toranomon Hills has added a good deal of eating and drinking within a few minutes’ walk.

teamLab Borderless at Azabudai Hills is roughly ten minutes on foot, which makes this the most convenient serious hotel for it. The Nezu Museum is fifteen minutes by taxi, and Den is in the same part of the city if the concierge can work a miracle.

For the other end of the Tokyo hotel market, Hoshinoya is the ryokan alternative, Ryumeikan is the well-judged mid-range choice by Tokyo Station, and The Millennials is the budget one.