If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.
Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (JPY120,948.62), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.
At Six Senses Kyoto, a luxury hotel in the city’s historic quarter, a heady dose of ancient culture can be absorbed by osmosis. Following the floral waft of the tea room, you’ll pass art flecked with folkloric references and windows gazing over 500-year-old shrine gardens. At the spa, bath houses and bespoke treatments draw on age-old healing knowledge. And the omakase restaurant spotlights seasonal produce straight from local suppliers. But when you’re ready to get hands-on, let the hotel’s concierge introduce you to the temples, tea houses and traditional craft workshops that have kept Kyoto winning hearts for centuries.
Please note Don’t let our enticing gallery deceive you, some of these images for Six Senses Kyoto are in fact computer generated. Apologies, real-life photographs will be with us soon…
Noon. Check-in is at 3pm, but both are flexible, subject to availability.
Prices
Double rooms from £774.96 (JPY153,000), including tax at 26.5 per cent. Please note the hotel charges an additional room tax of JPY1,000.00 per person per night on check-out.
More details
Rates at Six Senses Kyoto are room-only, but Sekki serves breakfast for JPY6,958 a person.
Also
Six Senses Kyoto has one Accessible Superior King room specially designed for wheelchair access. All communal areas, including the spa, can be accessed by wheelchair; only the pool and gym would require further manual assistance. The hotel has also installed braille blocks into pathways to help with navigation for visually impaired guests, and there are braille signs in the lifts.
At the hotel
Spa, gym, yoga studio, kids’ club and free WiFi throughout. In rooms: TV, Bluetooth speaker, air-conditioning, yoga mat, coffee machine and tea-making kit, minibar stocked with homemade and locally sourced snacks, free bottled water and sustainable bath products.
Our favourite rooms
If eeny-meeny is out of the question, pick based on your preferred view – leafy shrine gardens, a calm-inducing inner courtyard or Higashiyama’s higgledy, historic rooftops.
Poolside
The spa has an indoor pool, plus a dedicated Watsu pool for hydrotherapy treatments.
Spa
Holistic wellness is at the heart of the hotel’s all-frills spa. Treatments weave together smart tech, signature Six Senses indulgence and strands of time-tested Japanese healing. Succumb to the fountain-splashed, steam-blurred seduction of the traditional bath houses – you’ll emerge prune-fingered and too in touch with your inner peace to care. There’s also an indoor swimming pool and a Watsu pool for hydrotherapy, plus saunas and a steam room. Balance-restoring classes run in the yoga and meditation studio – including aerial yoga, for a more pulse-raising practice. Plus, the gym has personal trainers on hand and a high-tech recovery lounge. And at the Alchemy Bar, you can blend your own essential-oil tincture to take home.
Packing tips
Ditch the yoga mat (you’ll find one in your room) and do away with outdated travel guides – a tailored jaunt around the city with the hotel’s experts is a far less stuffy way to gen up on local culture.
Also
Snag a souvenir with a story at the hotel’s boutique, where you’ll find toys hand-sewn by local women learning the traditional sachiko method – all the proceeds go straight to the artisans themselves.
Children
Little Smiths are welcome, and will get their own look into local culture and sustainability at the Grow with Six Senses kids’ club.
Sustainability efforts
The hotel’s restaurants source most of their organic fruit and veg from a local family-run farm, and the rooms and restaurants are all free of single-use plastic. There are also plans in the works to partner with local initiatives to revive the trails in Kyoto’s mountains and boost the surrounding forest’s biodiversity.
On fine days, dine alfresco in the sun-dappled garden.
Dress Code
Clean tailoring and flowy-cut silk will suffice in place of a kimono, but if you have a sakura-print statement piece stowed away for special occasions, now would be the time.
Hotel restaurant
Sekki is the hotel’s all-day restaurant, where Six Senses’ earth-kind ethos places an emphasis on super-seasonal local produce. There’s an omakase sushi spot, too, plus Caffe Sekki, where sweet fancies are served alongside steaming pots of aromatic teas.
Hotel bar
At nightcap o’clock, follow the winding garden path to Nine Tails Bar. The craft cocktail menu entwines European classics and traditional Japanese flavours.
Last orders
Sekki serves breakfast from 7am to 10.30am, lunch from 11am to 2pm and dinner from 5pm to 10pm. Nine Tails bar pours from 5pm till midnight.
Room service
Dine in-room whenever you fancy with the 24-hour room service menu.
Six Senses Kyoto is set in the heart of Higashiyama, the city’s shrine-dotted historic quarter where lose-yourself lanes are lined with artists’ studios, pottery shops and aromatic tea houses.
Planes
It’s a 90-minute drive from Kansai International Airport, the region’s major hub. For domestic connections, Itami Airport is a little over an hour away. The hotel can arrange transfers from either airport, starting from JPY30,000 each way.
Trains
Breeze into Kyoto Station from Tokyo in under three hours on the Tokaido Shinkansen bullet train service. From there, it’s a handy 10-minute drive – the hotel can arrange transfers for JPY1,000 each way. Shichijō Station, a 10-minute walk from the hotel, links you up with other areas of the city as well as Osaka.
Automobiles
Kyoto is easily explored by foot, and there’s a speedy train and subway system to zip you around the city. If you do bring a car, there’s paid parking a three-minute walk from the hotel.
Worth getting out of bed for
In the heart of historic Higashiyama, Six Senses Kyoto puts the city’s best-preserved Zen and Shinto heritage within strolling distance. The hotel’s knowledgeable guides can lead you through labyrinthine lanes to religious sites, family-run shops and intimate artists’ studios. Head up the hillside to the cherry- and maple-shrouded Kiyomizu-dera Temple, or dive into Gion, Kyoto’s time-warp geisha district presided over by Yasaka Shrine and Pagoda. Maruyama Park blooms with crowd-drawing blossoms during sakura season; for a lower-key dose of nature, pint-sized Toyokuni Shrine’s lush gardens are on your doorstep. Or strike out of the city on a hike along cedar-shaded mountain trails.
Local restaurants
Higashiyama is the heartland of kaiseki, a centuries-old style of haute cuisine where each course of the set menu shows off a different finely tuned skill. Tables at the city’s top kaiseki restaurants are elusive, but the hotel’s concierge can play your fine-dining fairy godmother and secure you a sought-after table.
Otherwise, the best way to experience Higashiyama’s sense-tingling cuisine scene is to set off along the narrow lanes with no plan other than to disappear into whichever sushi bar, udon spot or sencha-scented tea shop exerts the greatest pull – our tip is Kasagiya, a tiny, atmospheric tea house specialising in adzuki-bean sweet treats. And for dinner with a difference, Noma alum Jacob Kear makes deft use of seasonal Japanese produce in his culture-melding menu at Lurra.
Local bars
Roll up to cosy Bar Rocking Chair for a chat with the omotenashi-minded bartenders and a crafted-just-for-you cocktail.
Every hotel featured is visited personally by members of our team, given the Smith seal of approval, and then anonymously reviewed. As soon as our reviewers have returned from this culture-rich hotel in Japan and unpacked their botanical scrubs and hand-sewn souvenirs, a full account of their spoiling city break will be with you. In the meantime, to whet your wanderlust, here's a quick peek inside Six Senses Kyoto…
Kyoto’s claim to the title of Japan’s cultural capital has been a millennium in the making – between cedar-shrouded mountains, a city has evolved rich with Shinto shrines and Zen temples, gardens and geisha districts, handicrafts passed parent to child and painstaking kaiseki cuisine.
Right in the centre of the city’s carefully preserved historic district, Six Senses Kyoto takes all that heritage to heart without sealing it in aspic. Time-honoured spa rituals are suffused with the latest wellness science and space-agey tech. The restaurant’s focus on organic, sustainable produce is firmly forward-looking. And though original art takes inspiration from the ancient Tale of Genji and the myth of the Moon Rabbit, the city’s deep seam of modern artistic talent doesn’t go untapped, with workshop and gallery tours giving a behind-the-curtain glimpse into the current craft scene. If Kyoto’s cultural cachet has been a millennium in the making, this Six Senses stay has its eye on the next one, too.
