Hoshino Resorts to build its first Gora condominium hotel, selling rooms to individual owners

Hoshino Resorts will build its first condominium-style hotel in Hakone's Gora area, the company said in a release, a 23-room project on a site where groundbreaking took place on November 25, 2025, with completion planned for winter 2027 and opening set for 2028.

The building, at Kiga in Hakone, will rise four storeys above a single basement level, designed by NAP Architectural Design Office and built by Satoh Construction's Tokyo branch. Hoshino described the project as adopting a for-sale condominium hotel (bunjo) format — new to the Gora area for the company — under which individual units are sold to private owners rather than held by an operator; the release set no price and did not say who will run the property day to day once it opens. Hoshino framed the site within Gora's history as a hot-spring villa district that developed from the Meiji era onward, drawing what it described as discerning collectors and refined tastes of the era, and said it aims to offer guests the joy and luxury of a retreat, a short distance from central Tokyo.

Selling rooms individually, rather than carrying the asset on its own books, lets Hoshino recover a small luxury project's construction cost upfront instead of financing it as a conventional hotel — a structure increasingly used to fund compact, high-end resort properties in Japan, where land and construction costs make a small full-service hotel hard to justify outright. At 23 rooms and roughly two years from completion to opening, the project reads as a narrow, high-end bet rather than a scale play, arriving in a Hakone hospitality market that has already drawn a run of upmarket openings this year.