River Retreat Garaku Restaurant L’évo Front “Rivage Garden”Gardens created

Photo by Sohei Yoshitake

Photo by Sohei Yoshitake

Photo by Yoji Sasaki

Photo by Sohei Yoshitake

Photo by Sohei Yoshitake

Photo by Sohei Yoshitake

Photo by Yoji Sasaki

River Retreat Garaku is an intimate luxury hotel on the shore of the Jinzu River in Toyama City. This lodging facility, whose theme is that of being a "museumesque hotel," has around 300 varieties of artwork. Ever since its opening in 2000, it has stayed firmly committed to providing the finest features in its guest rooms, furnishings, and Western-style and Japanese restaurants.

A design by Yoji Sasaki, then a professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design (now Kyoto University of the Arts), led to a total renovation of the garden in front of the hotel restaurant L'evo. To provide high-quality technique even at a worksite far away from Kyoto, our company's craftsmen used Ueyakato Landscape's original "unit construction method" (patent pending) to realize superior performance while also dramatically shortening the onsite construction period.

Because construction took place while the hotel's facilities and restaurants were open, the garden was finished within a short period of time, and with minimal disruption of hotel and restaurant services. This was accomplished under conditions where strict restrictions were placed on noise and transportation of materials onto the worksite.

The garden in front of the restaurant had been paved with wooden tiles but has now been changed to a modern stone pavement design combining black and white stripes. Looking out at the garden from the restaurant reveals the scene of a striped pattern harmonizing like water ripples with the surface of the Jinzu River.

In addition to this simple yet modern pavement design, also notice the interplay between the garden's organic green elements and the Corten steel wall with its Tateyama Mountain Range motif done in a traditional Toyama sash-bar ("kumiko") pattern. Touches such as these add to Garaku, a hotel devoted to art, the allure of a new art garden.

It is this combination of traditional skills with cutting-edge methods that allows the finer details of a garden's charm to be brought to life.