Bronze Interior Space and Exhibition Design · 2025
Soki Kanazawa Hotel
by Uds Ltd.
- A' Design Award 2025 Bronze Winner in Interior Space and Exhibition Design
- Awarded April 15, 2025
- CLIENT: Soki Kanazawa
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 12,548
- Verification code 72B61A6E98 · Verify this award
About Soki Kanazawa Hotel
Located in Fukuromachi, Kanazawa, a place where merchants once came and went and flourished, next to Omimachi Market, known as the kitchen of the city, the hotel combines traditional Japanese beauty with modern comfort, and aims to create a place that is loved by many people and contributes to the local community. By using local materials and working with local craftspeople, the project team aims to contribute to the local economy and a sustainable city, as well as providing guests with an authentic experience while creating opportunities for them to engage with the local culture.
Uds Ltd.'s Soki Kanazawa Hotel presents a corridor that appears to engage deeply with regional architectural traditions while articulating a distinctly contemporary hospitality vision, situating itself within design conversations that honor materiality, light, spatial sequence, and cultural memory as foundational to guest experience and environmental identity. The compositional achievement demonstrates sophisticated understanding of perspectival intensification, where relentless linearity and vanishing point focus create psychological draw toward destination while the measured rhythm of timber screening and punctuating bench placement introduces intervallic pause, balancing movement and rest, journey and arrival. The chromatic and material palette reveals notable restraint and discernment, limiting expression to warm natural timber in its authentic blonde tonality, cool neutral plaster and aggregate surfaces, and the grounding presence of a dark overhead plane, achieving visual coherence and atmospheric unity through reduction rather than addition, a strategy suggesting confidence in essential elements and respect for spatial clarity. Technically, the design exhibits accomplished integration of natural and artificial illumination, harnessing daylight through calibrated screening that filters without eliminating, creating dynamic luminous conditions responsive to diurnal cycles while maintaining ambient baseline through discrete architectural lighting, the interplay between warm filtered daylight and cool recessed sources producing subtle chromatic temperature shifts across surfaces that enliven the space without disruption. The vertical timber battens function simultaneously as structural rhythm, light modulator, textural presence, and cultural signifier, their regular spacing and material honesty recalling vernacular screening traditions while their crisp detailing and proportional refinement align with contemporary minimalist vocabularies, suggesting design that bridges heritage and innovation without resorting to literal quotation. The introduction of organic forms, visible as silhouetted branching against the illuminated reception backdrop, provides essential counterpoint to geometric rigor, inviting nature into architectural abstraction and suggesting philosophical positions regarding balance, seasonality, and the integration of living presence within built environment. The low benches positioned at intervals along the processional journey demonstrate sensitivity to human scale and guest experience, offering physical rest while their refined minimalist articulation maintains visual continuity with the architectural envelope, their pale wood material echoing wall screening while their horizontal emphasis provides relief from vertical repetition. Spatially, the design transforms a functional circulation requirement into an experiential threshold, understanding the corridor not as residual space but as meaningful transition, a calibrated journey from public arrival toward private sanctuary, employing perspective, light, material, and rhythm to choreograph movement and psychological preparation. One might contemplate how such spatial sequences shape our emotional readiness for experiences beyond, how the quality of transition influences our reception of destination, and how design that honors passage as meaningful rather than merely expedient enriches our inhabitation of architectural environments.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- The hotel combines traditional Japanese beauty with modern comfort. By using local materials and working with local craftsmen, we aim to contribute to the local economy and a sustainable city. The minimalist design and natural materials combine to create a calm and relaxed atmosphere. The hotel aims to provide guests with an authentic experience while creating opportunities for them to engage with the local culture, and is a thoroughly environmentally conscious hotel, including reducing waste.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The hotel is an eight-storey steel-framed building with a total floor area of approximately 4,612.36 sqm. There are 130 rooms of 12 types, ranging in size from 18 sqm to 37 sqm. The hotel caters for a wide range of travellers, from solo travellers to couples, families and groups of up to four people. The public bath is equipped with the ‘‘kakeyu‘‘ baths that have been popular in Kaga Onsen since ancient times. In the restaurant, fresh vegetables, seafood and other seasonal ingredients are carefully selected to provide dishes with a sense of seasonality and local colour.
- Tags
- Hotel, Design, Japan, SPA, Retreat, Traditional, Kanazawa, Locality, Ryokan, Craft
- Production Technology
- From the entrance, the approach to the reception area, which has a "araidashi" tiled floor, seems to lead into a Kanazawa alley. "Araidashi" is a traditional method in Kanazawa, where stones are laid after sand is applied.The traditional colors of Kanazawa, the Kaga Gosai (indigo, carmine, ochre, grass green, ancient purple), are used to create objects that gently intersect to form the space. The reception has an indigo blue plaster wall. The plaster wall in the restaurant is inspired by ochre.
- Design Challenge
- The hotel's design blends traditional Japanese aesthetics and modern technology. Its "fermentation" theme offers guests a stay that showcases the history and nature of Kanazawa. After your bath, enjoy a sweet sake brewed by a long-established Kanazawa sake producer. In the lobby, the new check-in machine with translation functions means less time and effort for guests and staff, the round table was designed to create interaction time. This blend of tradition and innovation reflects the hotel's commitment to simplicity, authenticity and nature.
- Project Duration
- The project started in Fukuromachi, Kanazawa, on 25 December 2019 and opened on 19 November 2022. The project is located in Fukuromachi, a place where merchants used to come and go and flourish, right next to the Omimachi Market, known as the "kitchen of the town".
- Operation Flow
- The hotel has strong ties with the local community. Many local materials and craftsmen have been used in the interior and room furnishings. The space is composed of objects constructed with the traditional colours of Kanazawa, Kaga Gosai (indigo, rouge, ochre, grass and ancient purple), gently blending with each other. Guests can enjoy local specialities and seasonal delicacies sourced from local producers.
- Research
- The project team researched the history of Kanazawa, the traditional colours of Kanazawa "Kaga Gosai", local materials, traditional construction methods of local craftsmen and seasonal delicacies. The results of this research have been used in the design to create a place that is rooted in the local community and to provide an opportunity for hotel guests to learn about the local culture. The hotel aims to create a place that is loved by many people and contributes to the local community.
- Inspiration
- "The Bare Vessel" - feel the seasons, taste the land and savour the ingredients. A hotel where you can return to your true self and live carefree. The hotel have incorporated many local materials and items made by local craftsmen. The hotel have used "raw" materials such as wood, stone, clay and iron, and connected the different spaces with different functions with "bare" materials and gentle curves to create a single connected "vesse" that is rooted in the land and loved by many people.
- Image Credits
- IMAGE CREDITS:
Image #1 to #5:Photographer Daisuke Shima,2022
Colors of Soki Kanazawa Hotel
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