Asama Onsen, a historic hot spring district in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, has been drawing visitors to its thermal springs in the foothills of Japan’s Northern Alps for over a millennium. Like many such areas, it had lost much of its former lustre by the time Matsumoto Jujo, an ambitious hospitality project and Design Hotels member, opened in July 2022. Part of a broader effort to revitalise the area, the project takes over Koyanagi, a historic inn founded in 1686 that had long lost its original character, with not one but two distinct hotels that also include a sprawling bookstore, a bakery, a lifestyle shop, a restaurant, and a hard cider brewery.
Also featuring two off-site cafés, one of which, “Okyaki & Coffee”, doubles as the reception desk—a deliberate arrangement that ensures every guest walks through the town before ever reaching their room—Matsumoto Jujo’s vision is to draw visitors into the urban fabric as well as serve as a social hub for locals. This ambition is echoed in its design: rather than attempting to recreate the past, it reinvents it through a layered dialogue between an industrial aesthetic and the country’s vernacular craft heritage.
