Restauranteur planning hotels for Karuizawa and Nasu

Hiramatsu Kashiko Island, Mie Prefecture

Restaurant and wedding function company, Hiramatsu, has announced plans to open an additional two auberge-style resorts in Karuizawa and Nasu.

Both resorts will have around 30 guest suites and are scheduled to open in 2020. The Karuizawa property is located on a 53,000 sqm site of leased land in Miyota Town, just west of Karuizawa. Annual revenues are forecast to be 1.1 billion Yen (approx. 10 million USD), and the total investment will be around 3 billion Yen (approx. 27 million USD).

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287m tall high-rise planned for Nihonbashi

Details on the Nihonbashi 1 Chome Central District Redevelopment have been announced. The project will include a 287m tall high-rise with office, hotel and serviced apartments, as well as several low-rise retail, office and residential buildings.

The high-rise tower will be taller than Tokyo Midtown (248m), Toranomon Hills (247m) and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (242m), but shorter than the 390m tall tower planned for the Tokiwabashi Redevelopment Project located 300 meters to the west of the Nihonbashi site.

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Sankei Building to enter Kyoto machiya hotel business

The machiya townhouse before renovations.

On July 27, The Sankei Building Co., a Tokyo-based real estate company, announced that they will be entering the Kyoto machiya hotel business. Their first property is a traditional machiya merchant residence located a kilometer from Nijo Castle that is scheduled to open in April 2018.

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100+ year old convent to be converted into luxury hotel

On July 31, Mori Trust announced that they have acquired the historic former Maria-en Catholic nursery school in Nagasaki. Mori will restore the 119-year old building and convert it into an internationally-branded luxury hotel targeting wealthy foreign tourists with an opening scheduled for around 2022. Mori Trust operates 21 hotels across Japan, and this will be their first venture in the Kyushu region. The seller was the Minami Yamate-kai social welfare corporation.

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12 Exclusive residences planned for Toranomon high-rise

A limited number of high-end penthouse condominiums are planned for the Tokyo World Gate development in central Tokyo’s Toranomon district.

The 12 luxuriously appointed residences will range in size from 150 ~ 400 sqm (1,614 ~ 4,304 sq ft). One of the residences will be a duplex-style apartment with ceiling heights of up to 6 meters. These exclusive residences are aimed at world-class business executives looking for one-of-a-kind sky homes in the heart of Tokyo.

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Historic Atami Villa sold to developer

On June 13 Mori Trust announced that they have acquired the historic holiday home of Taneji Yamazaki (1893-1983) in Atami City for an undisclosed price. Yamazaki was a successful businessman, founding several trading companies, including one which is now SMBC Friend Securities. In 1966 he founded the Yamatane Museum of Art in Tokyo, which was the first museum to feature only Japanese paintings.

The Yamatane-ryo was built in 1936. It is located just north of Kinomiya Station and about a 15 minute drive from Atami Station. It is a peaceful hillside neighbourhood with a history dating back over 1300 years. The 8,300 sqm (89,000 sq ft) property has views of Atami Bay, Hashima Island as well as the numerous firework festivals held over the bay throughout the year. Although the purchase price was not made public, similar properties in the Atami area are extremely rare and can fetch upwards of 1 billion Yen (approx. 9 million USD+).Read more


Luxury onsen resort planned for Nikko in 2019

Tobu Railway and real estate developer HULIC have announced plans to open a luxury hot spring resort in Nikko that will cater to wealthy tourists. The tentatively-titled ‘Nikko Fufu’ resort is scheduled to open in 2019 2020.

The 14,000 sqm site is located on Tobu-owned land in the Tomozawa district in Nikko. It adjoins the 40,000 sqm Nikko Tomozawa Imperial Villa and Memorial Park, and is close to the Nikko Tosho-gu Shrine. It was previously part of the Imperial Villa estate and was home to a traditional residence built in the 1910s that was converted to a hotel after WWII. The hotel was demolished in the 1970s and replaced with a newer hotel that was demolished in 2006. The land has sat vacant for the past 10 years.Read more