When in Japan: stay at BnA Alter Museum in Kyoto and / or BnA Walls in Tokyo

“We believe the creative renaissance has arrived. Now, more than ever, we – the creatives – are the drivers of change”. This is the inspirational sentence that welcomes global visitors to the incredible BnA Hotels: BnA Walls, BnA STUDIO, BnA Hotel Koenji in Tokyo, and BnA Alter Museum in Kyoto.

Have you ever dreamed of sleeping in an art gallery and enjoying artworks at night? Have you ever thought about the impacts that artworks might have on dreaming? Only in Japan: the BnA Alter Museum Hotels are simply stunning places to engage with art while enjoying the best of hospitality.

These fantastic locations present the works of artists, embedded within the premises as exhibitions guests and visitors alike, can enjoy. It’s serving the community of artists too, not just guests. BnA’s generous motto: “stay in an art room, become a patron,” a portion of each reservation is given to the artist who designed the space. “Not one BnA Hotel is the same, however there is one thing universal across them all; the BnA Patron Platform. We pay a portion of every booking fee collected directly to the artist who created the art room. Through our Patron Platform, we provide the artist we work with with continual income and exposure, while providing our guests with a private one-of-a-kind art experience.” CEO Yu Tazawa writes. That’s an amazing concept! The only hotel brand in the world that operates like an art patron platform throughout is BnA.

While arriving in BnA Alter Museum Kyoto, guests feel immediately immersed into the artist’s worlds with a dramatic installation from floor to ceiling. Earlier this year, the hotel also partnered with Kyotographie, the leading festival dedicated to photography with an exhibition of constructed still-life by System of Culture (Toshimitsu Komatsu, Yuma Sasaki) featured in the common areas of the hotel. In April this year, on the first floor, the slick and modern café also presented an exhibition grouping multiple artists using photography and mixed media. References to the body and to Le Corbusier’s Couvent de la Tourette were some of the themes expressed in the artworks on view.

In Kyoto, BnA Alter Museum features 31 boutique rooms each dedicated to an artist. The hotel is conveniently located five minutes’ walk from Gion and Kawaramachi, Kyoto’s cultural hubs. Train stations and buses are also close to the hotel, making it easy to see Kyoto’s renowned art galleries, shopping centres, modern museums, temples, and shrines. There are rooms with views of the Kamo River too which makes the experience even more spectacular. By experiencing the distinctive hotel rooms at BnA Alter Museum, guests can help these avant-garde Japanese artists via a profit-sharing scheme that BnA specifically designed for all BnA Hotels. Rooms have all modern amenities, ultra comfortable beds, fabulous showers and tea facilities.

But how did this innovative concept come about? CEO Yu Tazawa speaks to Art is Alive: “While working at a big consulting firm, I had a side business of running Airbnb apartments with Yuto. Renting out rooms was profitable but also kind of boring. We met Keigo, an architect and interior designer born and raised in LA. His personal mission was to elevate the world of art within the context of interior design. He designed offices with art as centerpieces. The idea was to combine our Airbnb business with his artistic interior design and create something new. We started in a very shady rented room in Ikebukuro where we were able to renovate everything creatively to conceive an artistic Airbnb: our very first BnA! From the beginning we wanted to give back to the artists who had added the value to this space.”

Highlights of the Kyoto Hotel includes the work of Sato Sugamoto presented in Double Dreams, a room featuring two perpendicularly-placed double beds under the artist’s work. Double Dreams illustrates how two people sharing a room can have connections and impact each others. Our dreams lead to intricate and entwined thoughts that fill the minds. The bright materials of this fantastic piece attached to the ceiling contrast with the white walls of the room. Sugamoto aims to depict the interconnected cerebral circuits that run through human brains by using vibrant coloured strings. The beauty of humanity’s unique personal ideals is expressed through the delicate interplay of an apparently endless number of separate lines. The symbols instilled by ideas of inversion also represent the inversion of our consciousness and unconsciousness. The conceptual framework of the piece is enhanced by the simplicity of its execution. Sweet dreams are made of this!

Other incredible rooms – whether Superior Double, Deluxe Quad, Deluxe Queen, Deluxe Suite – were designed by artists Lulu Kouno, Mina Katsuki, Daito Manabe, Mizuguchi Guchi, and Yusuke Nakano among many other fantastic artists. Each room is a dreamscape, each room has its identity and colour palette.

Yusuke Nakano’s room reminds guests they are in Kyoto. His creation is a room which alludes to the “Tōru,” a dreamy Noh play that takes place in Kyoto, in the Rokujo-Kawarain-Ato mansion, not far from the BnA Alter Museum. This is the area of Kyoto where the red-light district blossomed following the Edo period, and deeply marked by the rise and fall of the city’s Mediaeval Period. Using important elements like the moonlight, the energy of the waterfront, and the panoramic landscape of the old capital, the scene encapsulates the hallucinatory events narrated in the play. It has miniature cars, books displayed on the floor and hallucinatory trompe-l’oeil.

Growing up, artist SHOWKO was surrounded by a pottery studio with a 330-year history. Following her training in Saga prefecture, SHOWKO established SpringShow Studio in 2005 to produce ceramic art using her own techniques. In 2009, she introduced the designer ceramic brand Sione. By means of distinctive product design, branding, and tea ceremonies, SHOWKO looked to contemporary hospitality culture. Her Superior Double Bed Room is suspended in time and features ideas of tactility and time through rich ceramic pieces.

What’s the best asset: the art, the comfort, the design, the strategic location? “The art and the community behind it.” CEO Yu Tazawa continues. It takes a village to create such impressive hotels and the team is made of architects, artists, art directors, light artists and designers. Service is very friendly and professional and front desk managers are also art guides who share their passion and knowledge for the creation of the hotel.

Bna Walls in Tokyo is equally impressive. The newest, most inspiring creative hotel has a cafe, bar, lounge, and an artist’s studio. Guests will leave this location inspired, whether staying in rooms designed by artists (Colliu, Konel, Mariko Mukumoto, Haruna Kawai, and Ocho & Nigamuschi Tsuyoshi among others) or just hanging out with other creatives while listening to great music and experiencing the art books and exhibition in the reception area. “The Building is a brown brick building. It doesn’t look like a hotel from the outside as it is a renovated kimono company’s building”. Located in the fashionable Ginza neighbourhood, close to the Imperial Palace, four underground stations, and the historic Nihombashi district of Tokyo, BnA’s fourth art hotel boasts 26 unique rooms designed by fourteen Tokyo-based artists.

Each room is spectacular and the artists have been given carte blanche. BnA_WALL’s Suite Room for example is a room designed to “gather the memories of the city”. The floor is made up of blue hand-glazed tiles, each with a distinct patterns. These many tiles are high-definition copies of wall or road parts that can be found in Tokyo. The artists used 3D scanning to create each tile, which was then CNC-milled from porcelain slabs. Broken signage and decorations, misplaced items, even a fake vending machine, and wandering feline paw prints are also disseminated in the room. The ideas behind this large room are fantastic, and place the viewer at the centre of it, to either engage with the hidden pieces, or feel the texture of materials used to design it. Find the key! “We had various fashion shoots, most recently MAISONSPECIAL, and also a shoot for a CD album cover for aiko, a very famous musician in Japan.” CEO Yu Tazawa said about the uber-cool hotel.

BnA Walls in Tokyo features unique concepts and new ideas of luxury. The focal point of this art complex is the striking 5-metre mural wall. Every three months, a new mural is commissioned. All year long, visitors and hotel guests can enjoy artists in action from the hotel atrium. The hotel’s basement houses Factory, an experimental multipurpose space that can be used for events as well as art production and display. The creative team at BnA uses the area for new venture and idea development, as well as prototyping and testing in collaboration with partner companies.

CEO Yu Tazawa who aims to take the concept globally, sees the opportunities: “Mixing two inherently very different things – art projects and hotel operations – in one place; hotel operation requires planning and foreseeing everything to make things run smoothly without an issue every day. Art is by definition an unexpected thing. Nothing goes as planned, and it honestly shouldn’t. Those two things are very difficult to mix in one location, but that is what makes us unique, too.”

Currently on view is Air3 SCG in the Kyoto location, a project staged between July and September 2023, featuring members of a collective working in Kyoto. They were the artists in residence this year and present an exhibition in the hotel’s staircase and gallery. There’s always something to engage with at BnA!

These hotels are venues to return to, to discover something new and engage with creativity as a lifestyle. BnA redefines luxury, and places artists at the centre, both through the royalty concept and the design itself. Extraordinary!

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