Why you should experience SunnyHills at Minami-Aoyama in Tokyo, Japan.
SunnyHills at Minami-Aoyama is a sculptural confectionery where Minami-Aoyama's design culture, Taiwanese culinary tradition, Kengo Kuma's architectural experimentation and Japanese timber craftsmanship converge within an intricate wooden structure assembled.
Set along a residential street near Kotto-dori and just steps from the Nezu Museum, the three-story building rises behind a dense lattice of interlocking hinoki members whose projecting geometry transforms a compact urban site into an immediately recognizable work of contemporary architecture. Thousands of slender wooden pieces intersect through jigoku-gumi, a traditional lattice technique adapted into a structural system that filters daylight through the exterior and continues across walls and ceilings inside. Sitting within that timber enclosure for SunnyHills' pineapple cake and tea places the confection within the architecture created specifically for its Tokyo presentation, allowing craft at the scale of pastry and construction to reinforce one another. The result is a building where Kengo Kuma's structural experimentation, hinoki carpentry and SunnyHills' Taiwanese pineapple cakes turn a retail visit into an unusually concentrated encounter with contemporary Japanese design.
What you should know about SunnyHills at Minami-Aoyama.
SunnyHills at Minami-Aoyama is best known for Kengo Kuma and Associates translating the traditional Japanese jigoku-gumi lattice into the structural and architectural system of a three-story confectionery commissioned for Taiwanese pineapple-cake maker SunnyHills. Jigoku-gumi normally joins wooden members through interlocking cuts, and Kuma expanded the technique into a three-dimensional lattice whose constituent pieces intersect at 30-degree angles. Structural engineer Jun Sato collaborated with Kengo Kuma and Associates to develop the wooden assembly, turning a craft associated with smaller-scale joinery into a load-bearing spatial system distributed around the 297-square-meter building. Hinoki supplies the lattice with a species deeply associated with Japanese temple and shrine construction, linking the experimental geometry to a long carpentry tradition without disguising the individual members behind finishes. The building received international architectural attention through awards including the 2014 Design for Asia Grand Award, placing its reinterpretation of jigoku-gumi within a wider discussion of contemporary Asian design. Kengo Kuma, Jun Sato, jigoku-gumi and hinoki established SunnyHills at Minami-Aoyama as a technically ambitious demonstration of how traditional joinery principles operate at architectural scale.
SunnyHills developed the building around a Taiwanese confection whose principal agricultural ingredient connects the Tokyo branch directly with pineapple cultivation in Taiwan. The company uses indigenous Taiwanese pineapple varieties with pronounced acidity for a filling cooked into a dense fruit paste before enclosing it in a butter-rich pastry shell, preserving a flavor profile distinct from fillings dominated by winter melon. Japanese presentation extends that product lineage through tea service inside the timber building, making the pineapple cake the organizing element of a deliberately narrow hospitality ritual. SunnyHills packages the cakes in reusable cloth bags, extending the confection's physical presentation beyond pastry and tea into an object designed to travel with the purchaser. Taiwanese pineapple, fruit paste, pastry and cloth packaging form a continuous product system that gives the Minami-Aoyama architecture a precise commercial purpose rooted in SunnyHills' signature confection.
How to fold SunnyHills at Minami-Aoyama into your trip.
SunnyHills at Minami-Aoyama works as the culinary and architectural anchor within an afternoon route connecting private collecting, postwar residential experimentation and contemporary fashion architecture across Aoyama.
Begin at Nezu Museum, founded around industrialist and railway entrepreneur Nezu Kaichiro's collection of Japanese and East Asian art and opened to the public in 1941 on the site of his Aoyama residence. Its holdings include the National Treasure Irises screens by Ogata Korin, with the collection spanning painting, calligraphy, sculpture, ceramics, lacquer, metalwork and tea utensils before Kengo Kuma redesigned the museum in a building completed in 2009, extending the site's collecting history through a long tiled roof and garden-facing galleries. Continue to From First Building, completed in 1975 by architect Kazumasa Yamashita as an influential Aoyama commercial and residential complex organized through terraces, stairs and fragmented volumes. Fashion boutiques occupied its lower levels as residences filled the upper floors, and its layered circulation helped establish a form of small-scale urban architecture closely associated with Aoyama's emergence as a center for design and fashion during the 1970s. Conclude at Prada Aoyama, completed in 2003 by Herzog & de Meuron as a five-sided crystalline building wrapped in a steel diagrid and hundreds of diamond-shaped glass panels. Convex, concave and flat panes alter views through the façade as horizontal tubes organize retail floors inside, making the Tokyo commission a consequential stage in Herzog & de Meuron's exploration of structure, enclosure and luxury retail architecture. The progression moves from Nezu Kaichiro's private collection and Kuma's museum architecture through Yamashita's 1970s experimentation into Herzog & de Meuron's structural glass envelope, establishing the culture of collecting, design and architectural invention that gives SunnyHills at Minami-Aoyama its unusually credible setting.
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