Shigeru Ban Splits a Wellness Retreat in Two, Then Joins the Halves With a Skylit Atrium
Pasona Natureverse Retreat on Awaji Island gives half its 57 rooms a sea view and half a forest view, each with a private onsen, built around Ban's D-shaped plan and a month-long stay philosophy called Mibyo.
Shigeru Ban has built his career on solving a site by refusing to pick a single idea and running with it, and his newest project treats an entire island tip as two separate problems rather than one. Pasona Natureverse Retreat, which opened this month at the northern point of Awaji Island near Kobe, sits where a coastal landscape meets a forested one, and rather than smooth that contrast over, the Pritzker laureate designed the five-storey building as two distinct linear structures fused into a single D-shaped plan around a light-filled central atrium.
The two facades read almost like two different buildings. On the seafront side, Ban used the seawall itself as a podium and built a highly transparent elevation with four emphasised horizontal slabs, dissolving the line between interior, exterior and the Seto Inland Sea beyond it. The mountain-facing side does the opposite, built from timber-clad columns arranged in a rhythmic, classically vertical structure, anchored by a massive timber canopy and a grand staircase that greets arriving guests. It is the same building making two different arguments depending on which way you're facing.
That split carries through to the 57 guest rooms, roughly half looking out over the sea and half into the forest, every one of them fitted with a private onsen fed by the region's natural hot springs. Select rooms go further, with sensor-equipped beds that monitor guests' sleep patterns overnight, part of a retreat built around Mibyo, a preventive-wellness philosophy aimed at addressing health issues before they become diagnosable ones. The property is designed primarily around stays of thirty days or longer, though shorter visits are accommodated too.
The wellness programming is extensive enough to function as its own small campus: a dedicated clinic and treatment room, an aerial yoga studio strung with suspended fabric hammocks, a full gymnasium, and an indoor saltwater pool drawing water directly from the Seto Inland Sea. Five restaurants, several under Michelin-starred chefs, along with multiple cafes and a 500-seat event hall lined with 500 individual artworks set into its window panes, round out a program built less around sightseeing than around staying put.
Pasona Natureverse Retreat is the third project Ban has completed for Pasona Group on Awaji Island, following an earlier thatch-roofed restaurant and a wooden meditation retreat, and it reads as the most ambitious of the three precisely because it refuses to resolve its site into one mood. Full details on the retreat and its design are at Dezeen, and more on the architect's wider practice is at Shigeru Ban Architects.
