The Treetops Above Atami, One Hour From Tokyo

Tokyo is an hour away by train, and on the slopes of the Izu hills above Atami it may as well be another country. Hotel GrandBach Atami Crescendo sits among the treetops, a low building set back into the mountain so that the rooms look out through cedar and camellia to Sagami Bay. Arrive in the late afternoon and the city is a rumour; by dinner it has gone entirely.

The hotel is new to Small Luxury Hotels of the World, and it belongs to that quieter category of Japanese hospitality where the design is restrained and the service is not. The name says something about the intent. GrandBach is built around music as much as around the sea: a listening room with a serious sound system, a curated library of recordings, evenings where the volume is set for the room rather than the crowd. It is the kind of detail that reads as gimmick until you are sitting in it, and then reads as the whole point.

“An hour from Tokyo, the loudest city on earth, and the only sound is water moving through the trees.”

Treetops and hot water

The rooms are generous and calm, most with a balcony facing the water and enough height that the canopy is level with the window. Coffee on that balcony in the morning, with the bay going silver below, is the reason to set an alarm slightly earlier than you would at home.