Hakone Retreat före & villa 1/f
unscored · Ikyu 4.0 / 5no first-hand write-up in the thread
A Scandinavian-styled forest resort of 18 log-house villas in Sengokuhara, deliberately built as something other than a ryokan. Ikyu guests give it 4.03 over 34 reviews, and the reviews explain the middling number: forest quiet and the private-onsen villas draw raves, but service is the recurring sore point, with undertrained staff and breakfast lapses. It is a villa resort with private onsen tubs and makes no claim to be a traditional inn.
Scores
Food
Dinner is in the kaiseki room or at the wood-fired grill instead of in your villa, so you choose between a Japanese course meal and food cooked over a wood fire, and either way you walk out of the villa to eat. Ikyu guests put the food at 4.29, well above their mark for the service, and the complaints run to the serving more than the cooking, with breakfast the meal that repeatedly falls short.
Bath
Every villa has its own open-air onsen bath fed from a Hakone spring, and there are shared indoor and outdoor baths as well. Ikyu guests put the bathing at 4.21, and they praise having the spring to themselves at the villa.
Service
Service is the weak point, and three of the five recent Ikyu reviews are about it. The recurring complaints are halting, undertrained staff, many of them foreign hires with limited Japanese, meals that go wrong in the serving, guests hurried toward checkout, and a level of care that does not match the price. Ikyu guests put service at 3.47 against 4.2 or better elsewhere.
Room
The 18 villas are Scandinavian-styled log houses, each standalone with a wood stove and its own onsen bath, which is a long way from a ryokan room, and some villas take dogs. The rooms hold up in the reviews even where the service does not, and Ikyu guests put them at 4.24 against 3.47 for service.
Place
The resort spreads its villas across about 50,000 m² of Sengokuhara forest off the Hakone Ekiden course, and in 2025 it won a Good Design Award for the way the new Ibuki villa area fits the woods and the site's history. Guests write about the silence of the forest before anything else.
Getting there
- Tokyo — 2h10, 1 transfer. Odakyu Romancecar Shinjuku→Hakone-Yumoto (~85 min), Tozan railway→Kōwakudani (~35 min), 5-min inn shuttle (reserve).
- Kyoto — 3h, 1 transfer. Reverse of: Direct Tozan BUS Gōra/Sengokuhara→Odawara (~45 min — one seat; Tozan rail adds a Hakone-Yumoto change), then Tōkaidō Shinkansen→Kyoto (~1h50 on the ~2-hourly Odawara-calling 'Hikari'; 'Kodama'+change or ~2h40 all-Kodama otherwise).
- Osaka — 3h25, 2 transfers. Midōsuji hop Umeda→Shin-Osaka, Tōkaidō 'Hikari' Shin-Osaka→Odawara (~2h05 — the same ~2-hourly Odawara-calling 'Hikari' the hakone>kyoto leg uses at ~1h50 to Kyoto, plus the ~15-min Kyoto–Shin-Osaka segment; 'Nozomi' skips Odawara and all-'Kodama' is ~2h40), then the direct Tozan BUS Odawara→Gōra/Sengokuhara (~45 min, one seat; the Tozan rail adds a Hakone-Yumoto change).