08/2010
Hokkaido Jozankei
Jozankei Tsuruga Resort Spa MORI NO UTA
Task
Overall Planning/Concept Work/Logo Design/Interior-Design Planning/Sign Design
Restaurant Ware Design/Interior wear and Uniform Design/Promotional Tools Design/Furniture - Fixture Coordination
Woodland Wonders
The next resort spa in the “Uta” series, after Lake Shikotsu. This region, Jozankei, is about 40 minutes from Sapporo, making it extremely convenient and giving it a reputation as Sapporo's parlor, a hot spring area often used for parties and dinners. With Mori no Uta, we wanted to make a hotel geared towards women and families, something Jozankei didn't have, to serve a potential new client base in the area. The restaurant offers a buffet lunch for non-guests, accepting about 200 customers a day. The restaurant has birthed a new tourist industry. Without exception, the neighboring hotels have all started offering lunch.
To make Mori no Uta an entertainment resort for all ages, we filled it with woodland wonders for a sense of being drawn into the pictures books we all read and loved as children. It is a space designed to create the feeling of walking through the woods, where you can enjoy various mysteries, from the sign with a rabbit jumping into a wooden book, to the lounge with woolen carpet runners evoking the soft forest floor and a hearth perfect for roasting marshmallows, or the restaurant filled with the talk of forest creatures. And to recreate the refreshing air of the forest, we lined every space with designs using humidity-controlling diatomaceous shale from Wakkanai in Hokkaido.
Jozankei Mori no Uta lies in within a white birch forest. We renovated an existing business' entertainment facilities into a forest picture book resort spa.
Like a walk in the woods, like a trip into a picture book, a wondrous, fun forest story...
Developing designs using unfired tiles of humidity-controlling diatomaceous shale.
These are unfired hand-made tiles containing crushed diatomaceous shale from Wakkanai, in Hokkaido. They are excellent at controlling humidity and odors, and destroy air-borne toxins. This project became a way to leverage natural resource development, and was selected as a Hokkaido promotional project. They are also used in our aesthetic spa rooms and guest rooms.