Daikanyama

What to see

Daikanyama T-Site is the set piece, and you should walk in along Kyu-Yamate-dori, the tree-lined road that carries most of the neighbourhood's character. Three white lattice pavilions are linked by a covered magazine street, and the block behind them, with its cafe, small shops and a garden where dogs outnumber children on weekend mornings, is built for lingering rather than shopping. Go early on a weekday and you'll have the campus close to empty until eleven.

The counterpoint is the Kyu Asakura House, a 1919 wooden residence with a stroll garden. It sits directly behind the boutiques, and it's about the price of a vending-machine coffee to get in. Sliding doors, tatami rooms, a hillside garden of maples and stepping stones. It's why Daikanyama's streets bend the way they do, and most visitors walk straight past the gate. From there, Saigoyama Park gives you a long west-facing view over Meguro that turns gold before sunset, and the paths downhill from it lead into Nakameguro's canal. Between those three points, the sightseeing is the streets themselves, low-rise and full of small-scale architecture.

Where to eat and drink

Daikanyama is a daytime eating neighbourhood. Brunch, coffee, a long lunch, then somewhere else for dinner. Saturdays NYC Daikanyama sets the tone, a surf-brand coffee shop on the most stylish block in the area with a terrace that fills by eleven on weekends and holds the sun most of the day. The matcha latte is better than a surf shop has any right to make, and there's no better people-watching in the neighbourhood than from that terrace. It sits beside Daikanyama T-Site, whose own cafe and the Anjin lounge upstairs, where drinks come among shelves of vintage magazines, will cover the rest of your morning and can swallow a rainy afternoon whole.

Beyond those two, the pattern is terraces and bakeries along Kyu-Yamate-dori and Hachiman-dori, mostly Western-leaning, mostly priced for the neighbourhood, and mostly closed by early evening. So eat lunch here, then walk. Nakameguro's riverside restaurants and backstreet counters are ten minutes downhill, and Ebisu's izakaya alleys are fifteen minutes the other way. Daikanyama is the elegant middle of that triangle, and you'll usually eat a better dinner at either end of it.

Where to stay

Daikanyama has a small number of design-led boutique hotels and serviced apartments in the streets around T-Site and toward the Tokyu Toyoko station, and there's almost nothing at the budget end. Rooms tend to be quiet and well designed, and they're priced accordingly. It suits couples, design-minded travellers and anyone who wants mornings to start with coffee on a terrace rather than a station concourse. Shibuya's crossing is a fifteen-minute walk and Nakameguro's canal ten, so the location is stronger than the sleepy streets suggest. If you want late-night options on the doorstep, or a broad choice of mid-range chains, you'll do better in Shibuya or Ebisu and come to Daikanyama for a morning.

How to do it in a day

Walk in from Shibuya, fifteen minutes along the slope, or take the Toyoko Line one stop. Be at Saturdays NYC Daikanyama by nine for coffee on the terrace before it fills, then move next door to Daikanyama T-Site while the magazine street is still calm. Give the pavilions and the garden until late morning, with a pause in the Anjin lounge upstairs. Walk two minutes to the Kyu Asakura House and spend half an hour in the tatami rooms and the hillside garden. Lunch is on one of the terraces along Kyu-Yamate-dori. Early afternoon belongs to the boutiques and side streets. Then head for Saigoyama Park for the west-facing view and take the path downhill into Nakameguro as the light lowers. Walk the canal, eat dinner in the backstreets there, and let the Hibiya or Toyoko line take you home. You'll have walked barely three kilometres all day.