"With just 86 guest rooms, The Tokyo Edition, Ginza is a perfect jewel box of a hotel—its older sister in Toranomon, which opened in 2020, boasts 206 rooms spread across 31 floors—and it seems to have been constructed with the express purpose of providing high-net-worth individuals with the rarest of all luxuries: peace, discretion, and a sense of anonymity. Designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, whose buildings are best known for their swoops of cedarwood and retina-glitching metalwork (among them Japan’s National Stadium and the V&A Museum in Dundee), its glass facade is latticed with aluminum beams, while the curtains draped behind them are just opaque enough to emit a mysterious warm glow onto the pavement. Inside, an immediate reset to the nervous system: a dark walnut and plush cream lounge suffused with that same black tea aroma—a bespoke Le Labo scent—that envelops all 19 of the Edition’s properties." - Daniel Rodgers
