Altura Higashiyama
Thirty-four rooms in the shadow of Kiyomizu-dera.
Altura Higashiyama is a contemporary ryokan-inspired house five minutes' walk from Kiyomizu-dera. Thirty-four rooms with cedar-wood interiors, sliding shoji screens, and engawa verandas opening to an interior moss garden. A traditional kaiseki restaurant and an intimate tea house with a full tea-ceremony service.
Sesame-tofu kaiseki course plated tableside by the chef, goma-dofu made each morning from Uji sesame and arrowroot, presented on a Raku-yaki plate that rotates with the month.
A 120-year-old Japanese maple in the central moss garden, relocated from a Higashiyama temple during construction and re-rooted under supervision from a Kyoto master gardener; its canopy forms the view from the library suite.
- Contemporary ryokan five minutes from Kiyomizu-dera
- Cedar-wood interiors with shoji screens and engawa verandas
- Moss-garden central courtyard with a 120-year-old maple
- Tea house with full tea-ceremony service by appointment
Five minutes to Kiyomizu-dera, eight minutes through the preserved Sannen-zaka stone alleys to Kodai-ji, twelve minutes to Gion's Hanami-koji, eighteen minutes to Yasaka Shrine.
Our in-house tea master, trained at Urasenke, offers a private ninety-minute tea ceremony in a dedicated eight-tatami tea house for up to four guests, booked at check-in rather than through the concierge. No equivalent service exists at any chain hotel in Kyoto.
- · Kaiseki dining with a tasting menu that changes monthly
- · Traditional tea house with full-ceremony service
- · Onsen-style soaking bath
- · Concierge coordinating temple-and-garden itineraries
What guests took home.
“Rooftop breakfast over Kyoto with the chef plating sesame tofu tableside is the kind of moment you actually remember five years later. We have stayed at three ryokans in Kyoto and this was the first where the traditional elements did not feel like a performance.”
“I have done four tea ceremonies in Kyoto across the past decade. This was the only one where I was genuinely the only guest, the only one where nobody was looking at their watch, and the only one where the master asked me a single, thoughtful question at the end. Ninety minutes. I paid more than I would elsewhere; the difference was plain.”