Arashiyama VillaGardens created｜Gardens managed

The Arashiyama Villa is a newly built company recreation facility located nearby Tenryu-ji Temple. Professor Yoji Sasaki of the Kyoto University of Art and Design (now Kyoto University of the Arts) and Ohtori Consultants Environmental Design Institute worked together on the landscape's planning and design. Ueyakato Landscape entered this project at a critical stage when important decisions such as what materials to use were being considered, thus allowing us to construct a garden landscape space that makes full use of garden techniques only available in Kyoto.

The garden is based on the motif of water flowing through the nearby Oi River and Hozu Gorge. The result is a bright and modern Japanese garden that befits a new building while still retaining the Arashiyama area's unique charm. In addition to its three gardens (front, middle, and inner), the property also features an entrance and parking lot.

In the front entrance and parking lot area, we laid a scattered hailstone pavement ("ararekoboshi") made of river stones around a prominent Kurama stone, a prized garden stone from Kyoto's Kurama River. The facility's pathway is an intricate composition combining curbstones ("kazura-ishi") with naturally rounded stones ("tama-ishi"). The parking lot features a dazzling design of black and white stones that have been laid rowlock (a style known as "kobadate" in Japanese) and enclosed in a stone wall made of stone materials that we processed and combined. As the garden's builders, this is the area we worked hardest on.

The front garden is designed in the image of small boats on a river. Boat-shaped islands covered in moss float in white sand likened to a water surface. The middle garden is a beautiful space designed in a checkerboard pattern made of bamboo and bamboo grass. The inner garden is composed of black gravel resembling the water of the Hozu Gorge, with maple trees and other plants inserted in between long broken slabs of stone. Its seasonal features, including cherry blossoms and fresh green colors in spring and autumn leaves in fall, are stunning sights to behold.

Arashiyama Villa is a garden landscape that uses Kyoto's traditional gardening techniques to fuse modern sensibility with the characteristic feeling of the Arashiyama area. In the finest spirit of the Japanese gardening tradition, it seamlessly integrates contemporary social surroundings with the timeless beauty of the natural environment.