Mori Building

Mori Building’s mixed-use properties are playing a pivotal role in shaping Tokyo’s modern landscape, creating new neighbourhoods and communities that have become benchmarks around the world. As their partner for over a decade, we’ve helped them pave the way – turning projects into places by defining their visions and experiences.

Our partnership with Mori Building has focused on two developments that have influenced the future of both the company and Tokyo itself – Hotel Toranomon Hills and Azabudai Hills. For each, we’ve developed place strategies, crafted narratives and created concepts for area activations.

Azabudai Hills started with a plan for an 8.1 hectare mixed-use development in central Tokyo, all surrounded by lush greenery, and a challenge: how to give the neighbourhood a clear character and create a city within a city?

We created a positioning for Azabudai Hills that represented its unique take on community and nature, as well as its expansive, holistic offer: the modern urban village. This vision, and the ideas it inspired, became the foundation of a shared language between developer, architect and the wider world – one that was used throughout the eight year development all the way up to its opening in 2023. It also became a launching pad for the way the space inside the development was activated. From retail planning to outdoor wellness, art exhibitions and cultural events to amenities and information, we guided the elements that took Azabudai Hills from a collection of buildings to a place where people want to build a life.

The Hotel Toranomon Hills project posed a different question entirely: what does hospitality look like when you’re already surrounded by service? Set amongst the four towers of Mori Building’s Toranomon Hills development, the new hotel and restaurant would boast connections to residential apartments, workspaces, a luxury spa and an expansive retail offer – all managed by a single organisation.

We shaped Hotel Toranomon Hills as an urban living room – the responsive heart of the Toranomon Hills development, where guests and community are encouraged to interact with each other, with the wider Toranomon Hills offer, and with the culture of Tokyo. And we helped to stimulate excitement and curiosity about the wider Toranomon Hills development by creating ToMoTo Times, a dual language newspaper series including interviews with local residents, workers and the tower’s architects, alongside charming illustrations that brought the scheme to life. The result is a place that’s authentic, human and tuned to the needs of guests, all enabled by Mori Building’s experience and know-how.