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Still Water
Reserve

Ryokan · Higashiyama, Kyoto · Since 1824

Seven rooms. One pond. No clocks.

A seven-room inn built around a koi pond fed by the same mountain spring for two hundred years. Stay long enough and you stop counting the hours, and start counting the fish.

Reserve a room See the rooms

The rooms

Every room opens onto the water.

Seven rooms in three kinds, each with its own veranda over the pond. No televisions, no clocks. The light tells you the time, and the koi tell you when it is morning.

A tatami room with shoji open onto a moss garden and the edge of the pond

Koke · three rooms

Moss

Ground floor on the north bank, where the cushion moss runs right up to the cedar boards of the veranda. Tatami for two, a deep hinoki tub, shoji that slide away entirely. The quietest rooms in the house.

28 m²2 guestsGarden bath

from ¥68,000 / night, dinner & breakfast

A ryokan room with a cedar tub and a red maple framed by the window

Momiji · two rooms

Maple

Under the hundred-and-forty-year-old momiji. In the third week of November its leaves fall onto the water outside your window, and for nine days the pond is more vermilion than green.

34 m²2–3 guestsCedar soaking tub

from ¥84,000 / night, dinner & breakfast

An upper room at night opening onto a moon-viewing deck over the pond

Tsuki · two rooms

Moon

The upper floor, with a moon-viewing deck built out over the pond. On clear nights the moon sits in the black water directly beneath you, and the stone lantern is lit at dusk.

41 m²2 guestsPrivate tsukimi deck

from ¥112,000 / night, dinner & breakfast

Kaiseki & tea

Dinner arrives in nine courses, and in no hurry.

Chef Aoki Ren has cooked in this kitchen for twenty-two years. The old calendar has seventy-two seasons of five days each, and his menu follows every one of them.

  1. SakizukeSesame tofu, fresh wasabi, one chrysanthemum petal
  2. HassunThe fortnight on a cedar tray: ginkgo, persimmon, grilled sweetfish
  3. YakimonoSpanish mackerel over binchō charcoal, yuzu miso
  4. TomewanRed miso with clams from Lake Biwa, rice from the Tamba hills

06:10

Tea at first light. Before breakfast the tea master whisks matcha on the flat stone beside the lantern. Guests sit on the moss in borrowed haori. The koi come to the edge to see who is up.

9courses at dinner
72micro-seasons a year
1seating, at dusk

The seasons at Still Water

The same pond, four times a year.

  1. SpringMarch – April

    Cherry petals drift over the wall from the temple next door and gather in the corners of the pond. The koi wake up hungry.

  2. SummerJune – August

    The lotus open at dawn and close by noon. Fireflies over the water in the first week of July, and the veranda doors stay open all night.

  3. AutumnOctober – November

    The maple turns. Nine days when the pond is more red than green; most guests book them a year ahead.

  4. WinterDecember – February

    Snow on the lantern’s roof. The koi rest deep and slow under the ice-cold spring, and the house is at its most silent.

Reservations

The pond keeps its own time. Come and keep it with us.

We answer every request by hand within a day. Nothing is charged until we write back to confirm.