Six Senses Kyoto

'MAMAN!'

I spin round. Injury? Lost bag? Abandoned toy?

'LOOK! AN ICE-CREAM VENDING MACHINE!'

The Shinkansen doors close behind us, taking their air-conditioning with them. We stand on the platform with a seven-year-old, a 10-month-old and enough luggage to suggest permanent relocation. Kyoto’s August heat and humidity body-slams us.

Two days into the trip, the parenting rulebook has been reduced to confetti. We’ve embraced more-is-more: more snacks, more chaos and more snacks to contain (or possibly encourage) the chaos. The ice-cream, like us, begins melting before we leave the platform. Our hotel, Six Senses Kyoto, is 10 minutes away by taxi, but it may as well be in another prefecture.

Kyoto used to be my place. I lived around these parts for a couple of years in what I now realise may have been my prime: carefree evenings beside the gushing Kamo River and its resident jungle crows and elegant grey herons, ice-cold konbini chuhai sweating in my hand, answerable to nobody’s bedtime but my own. These days, I am answerable to two, neither of them mine.

On a bland (for Kyoto) road between the aforementioned Kamo River and the Higashiyama district’s heavyweight temples, Six Senses Kyoto doesn’t give much away behind its sleek façade of vertical timber slats. Inside, a pale-timber ceiling folds like giant origami; a huge dark bronze scroll buckles like paper, with rabbits and frogs scampering over it — a riff on Choju-giga, often considered Japan’s first manga. It’s all so beautiful and unnervingly serene. 'Wow. Is this where we’re staying?' whispers Little Smith. We are damp and the baby is testing the acoustics. Have we been delivered by mistake?

Cold apple-and-ginger juice arrives. Then powdered incense, rubbed between our palms to release its grounding scent. It’s a lot of ceremony for people lightly glazed in liquefied ice-cream, but we politely inhale and try to look spiritually receptive. Before it takes effect, Saki from the kids’ club kneels beside our daughter. She talks to her — not to us about her — and offers a basket of origami creatures. Little Smith picks a frog (here, it’s 'kero-kero', not 'ribbit-ribbit').

'Saki says I can make more cool stuff with her downstairs.'

My shoulders drop an inch. Perhaps we haven’t been delivered here by mistake.

Up in our room (a Deluxe Twin), fruit so glossy it would make an M&S food stylist weep keeps the children busy, while we dismantle jewel-like, black-sesame financiers. The minibar’s local soft drinks provide round two; Kimino’s yuzu fizz is the unanimous winner. Better still, they’re all included, sparing us the usual calculation in which thirst is weighed against financial ruin.

Our daughter finds the room’s biggest attraction: a wooden lattice between bedroom and bathroom, its panels swivelling from etched hemp leaves to red lacquer. She turns a few sideways to open a hatch and installs herself as café proprietor, charging handsomely for imaginary matcha lattes. The minibar may be included; her café is not.

Having conquered food and beverage, she expands into wellness, running her father a bath in the deep rectangular tub and sprinkles in almost all the fragrant, sleep-inducing salts. A long-handled wooden wash bucket completes what she declares an onsen. From the doorway, he looks less bathed than lightly cured.

At breakfast in Sekki, more children emerge from the lifts, all sleepy and rumpled, and are brought back to life by fluffy rice-flour pancakes, homemade granola and Japanese breakfast plates piled high with sushi, miso soup and pickles. By dinner, our suspicion that we alone have breached security seems ridiculous. Baby Smith beams at the kitchen team until one smitten member asks to borrow him. As he grins his way around the restaurant on the hip of an angel, a crisp constellation of just-blanched summer vegetables in chilled dashi and yuzu broth reduces our conversation to its most appreciative form: 'Mmm. Mmm…' Our son returns with his heart as full as our bellies.

Later, father and son set off for a walk just as thunder starts rumbling over Kyoto; the girls go to the spa. At the entrance I hesitate. Is a seven-year-old really allowed inside this immaculate bathhouse? Apparently so.

We have it to ourselves, making the compulsory birthday suits easier to bear. Inky-tiled baths face a glass wall framing craggy rocks and greenery. The storm doesn’t reach us here, just the meditative drip-drip-drip of the water. I suggest sitting still to achieve Zen. Instead, my daughter splashes and sploshes between the three baths — hot, warm, cold — flits between sauna and steam, then starts again. Only when I stop trying to make her relax ‘correctly’ do we both actually relax. There’s probably a wellness lesson in there somewhere.

On our final night, Mr Smith tries to teach our baby the merits of sleep, while Little Smith and I slip down for an illicit drink at the very foxy Nine Tails, an amber-lit den of ruby banquettes, an emerald-tiled bar and bronze latticework. It’s Wes Anderson after-dark. Before you call social services, the illicit part is the bedtime.

Dressed in a yukata (a lightweight summer kimono), my daughter collects compliments en route to the watering hole and is welcomed like a guest of honour, choosing a corner sofa around a tree-trunk table. I order umeshu (a plum liqueur) on the rocks; she has apple juice. Popcorn and miniature senbei rice crackers are snaffled. Our waitress clocks the empty bowl and returns with one almost the size of her head and a conspiratorial wink. She must live by more-is-more, too.

By the end of our stay, Six Senses Kyoto has persuaded me of what it seemed to know from the start: our children belong here. Somewhere between the origami frog, the over-salted bath and an indecent amount of popcorn, I stop scanning for disapproval and start enjoying the small things, and that might just include your children too.