Fujiya Hotel

The Fujiya opened in 1878 as one of Japan's first Western-style hotels, and its cluster of buildings above the Miyanoshita gorge remains a beguiling architectural scrapbook: dragon-crested gables, red-lacquered balustrades and half-timbered wings that blend Meiji-era Japan with Victorian resort fashion. A painstaking renovation completed in 2020 renewed the structures without sanding away their character, and the corridors still creak agreeably with age.

Rooms vary from compact historic chambers to the grander quarters of the Flower Palace wing, all trading contemporary minimalism for period charm — high ceilings, polished timber and garden outlooks. The hotel's spring-fed baths and hot-spring swimming pool anchor the wellness offering, while the terraced gardens climb the hillside past greenhouses and koi ponds. Guest registers over the decades have carried some famous twentieth-century names, John Lennon among them, and the hotel wears this history lightly rather than as a marketing device.

The main dining room, with its coffered ceiling and alpine views, serves the French-influenced cuisine the hotel has cooked for generations, and breakfast here is a period piece in the best sense. Hakone's ropeways, art museums and views of Mount Fuji are all within easy reach by the mountain railway that stops below the hotel. For travellers who find modern onsen resorts anonymous, the Fujiya offers hot-spring bathing with a biography.