A garden on the thirty-eighth floor

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The lift doors open on the thirty-eighth floor and a wall of living plants is waiting. Outside the glass, Akasaka keeps going. Inside, the smell is wet moss and warm cedar. 1 Hotel Tokyo opens above the Trust Tower in March, the brand's first key handed to a porter in Japan.

Akasaka sits in the fold between political Tokyo and commercial Tokyo. The Prime Minister lives ten minutes north. Roppongi is five minutes east. The Trust Tower rises at the seam, and 1 Hotels has taken its upper floors. The arrival is by elevator, fast and silent, into a lobby that has been planted like a forest floor.

The brand is New York by birth. Barry Sternlicht opened the first in 2015, on Central Park South, with the rule that everything a guest touches should have once grown somewhere. The rule has travelled. Mayfair got a 1 Hotel last year. Melbourne the year before. Tokyo is the newest address, and the one the house has been courting longest.

The lobby

Creme, the studio run by Jun Aizaki between Brooklyn and Tokyo, handled the interiors with the 1 Hotel in-house team. The botanical wall in the lobby is the first thing a guest registers. It runs the full height of the double volume. Ferns, mosses, low shrubs. A black cedar desk sits in front of it with a single brass bell.

The floors are Oya stone, the pale volcanic tuff quarried north of Tokyo and loved by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Imperial Hotel. Recycled timber wraps the columns. The rest of the lobby is done in muted earth tones, the colour of tatami that has been walked on for years.

The rooms

Floor-to-ceiling glass on all sides. The view west takes in Mount Fuji on a clear morning; the view east runs over Roppongi Hills to the bay. The rooms are done in oatmeal linen and raw cedar, with cotton slippers laid out on woven mats and a slim brass kettle on the desk.

Beds are low and wide, the frames made from reclaimed timber. The shower is separate from the bath. The bath is deep enough to sit in properly, lined in grey-blue stone. There is no polished marble anywhere in the room, and nothing gilded. The minibar holds green tea and cold sake.

The food

The all-day restaurant sits on the thirty-ninth floor, one level above the lobby. The kitchen is led by a chef whose last post was a kaiseki counter in Azabu. The menu reads as though it were written by someone who has stopped trying to impress anyone: grilled sweetfish, simmered kabocha, rice cooked in a clay pot and brought to the table steaming.

The bar opens at five. It has a view of the Diet building and a short list of Japanese whiskies poured in generous measures. After nine, a local jazz trio plays quiet sets.

Why it matters

Tokyo has been short on hotels that take the biophilic argument seriously. Aman, Four Seasons Otemachi, the reopened Park Hyatt; all beautiful, all rooted in stone and metal and glass. 1 Hotel Tokyo adds something different to the row. It brings plants indoors and asks the architecture to step back.

The house rule about materials means the lobby smells of earth and the corridors sound softer. A guest who has flown fourteen hours from London or New York notices the shift within the first thirty seconds of walking in.

The verdict

Book a west-facing room. Be in the lobby early, before the breakfast service picks up, when the botanical wall is still waking up under the house lights. Take the lift up one floor to the restaurant and order rice cooked in the clay pot.

The Park Hyatt will always have Sofia Coppola. The Aman will always have the Fuji view from the pool. 1 Hotel Tokyo has the quietest lobby in Minato, and a wall of living green that changes through the day.

1 Hotel Tokyo opened in March 2026 at 2 Chome-17-22 Akasaka, Minato City, Tokyo. Standard rates from approximately ¥95,000 per night. Book through 1hotels.com/tokyo.

Photography by Sohei Oya & Nacása & Partners Inc / Wallpaper*