A former Russian consulate on a Hokkaido hillside is an unlikely setting for a Relais & Châteaux address. Hotel Biaclyn Hakodate has taken a 1908 diplomatic outpost - the only surviving building of its kind in Japan - paired it with a newly built wellness wing, and turned the whole thing into a six-suite hotel where every room comes with its own sauna. Between the sauna culture and the Soviet-era emblem still on display in the gift shop, this is not your standard heritage conversion.
Location
The hotel sits at the top of Saiwaizaka in Funamicho, near Hakodate's Motomachi district - the part of town known for its hillside churches, foreign consular buildings, and streets that still carry the imprint of the city's decades as one of Japan's first international ports. From here you look straight down onto Hakodate Port, watching ships move in and out below you.
Getting there is straightforward: Hakodate is roughly 1 hour 20 minutes by direct flight from Tokyo, or about 40 minutes from Sapporo. If you'd rather take the train, the Hokkaido Shinkansen runs from Tokyo Station to Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto in around 4 hours, followed by a 20-minute local connection into Hakodate Station itself. By car, the hotel is about 10 minutes from JR Hakodate Station, 25 minutes from Hakodate Airport, and 35 minutes from Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto Station.
From Diplomacy To Hospitality
The building went up in 1908, rebuilt on this site after fire destroyed an earlier structure, and served as the Russian and later Soviet Consulate until 1944. It was designed by the German architect Richard Seel, who had come to Japan originally to oversee construction work for the Ministry of Justice in Tokyo's Kasumigaseki district before setting up his own firm in Yokohama.
Seel's design blends Japanese and Western elements, combining karahafu gables with Western columns and Byzantine-style capitals - an eclectic mix that's part of why the place still stands out.
Hakodate city bought the consulate in 1964, and it stayed in municipal hands until a Nagoya-based company purchased it in 2021 with plans to restore it. The new wellness wing added alongside the original brick building was designed by Makoto Nakayama, founder of what is now known as Makoto Nakayama Architects, based in Sapporo.
The hotel opened on Saturday, July 12, 2025, with Relais & Châteaux affiliation following that November. One holdover from the Soviet era is still on view: an emblem bearing the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" in several languages, now displayed in the ground-floor gift shop of what's called the Consulate Wing.
Food and Drink
Main Dining BIACYA
Main Dining BIACYA is the hotel's principal restaurant, set under chandeliers in a room where the original polished floors do a lot of the visual work. The cooking is modern French technique applied to Hokkaido ingredients, with the occasional Russian inflection as a wink toward the building's history.
At the time of writing, the signature dish is called Prunier of the North, and the wider menu includes Gangi skate from nearby waters with cabbage and sherry vinegar sauce, a bite-sized baked piroshki the kitchen calls Piroshki Mignon, a dish named Turnip and Black Earth that's meant to evoke Hokkaido's frozen soil, plus a sea urchin butter and an Ezo abalone risotto. Ezo venison, sourced from Tokachi producer ELEZO, also shows up on the menu.
Breakfast leans on fresh local vegetables, fruit, ham, and bacon, and if you're staying more than one night you can choose between a Western spread or a Japanese breakfast built around rice steamed in a donabe pot, seasonal soups, and simply grilled fish. If you join the hotel's early-morning excursion to the wholesale seafood market, you'll come back to an extended breakfast featuring seasonal seafood such as Ezo abalone and sea urchin, sourced directly from a local fish shop that morning.
Beyond the main dining room, the hotel also runs Sushi Dokoro FUNAMI, an eight-seat counter working in the Ezo-mae style, and Bar Hakodadi.
The Rooms
Wellness Suite B
There are six suites in total, split between the two wings, ranging from around 100 to 115 square meters (1,076 to 1,238 square feet). Every suite has its own dry sauna made by Estonian brand HUUM along with a cold water bath, a sofa and coffee table from MOLTENI, a bed from DUXIANA, a separate rain shower, and twin washbasins - so the sauna culture isn't confined to a shared spa, it's built into each room.
The two Consulate Suites sit in the original 1908 building. Consulate Suite A is 102 square meters (1,097 square feet) with two king beds, while Consulate Suite B is 103 square meters (1,108 square feet) and includes an 8.5-tatami tea room with futon bedding, so it can sleep two additional people on traditional bedding alongside the king bed in the main room.
The Wellness Suites
Wellness Suite D
The four Wellness Suites occupy the newly built wing, arranged around a Harunire elm, said to be around 200 years old, that shapes the view from several of the rooms.
Wellness Suite D
• Wellness Suite A is 101 square meters (1,087 square feet) and includes a light court, known as Hikari-Niwa, along with a semi-outdoor bath open to the sea breeze.
• Wellness Suite B, the largest of the four at 115 square meters (1,238 square feet), has the same Hikari-Niwa and semi-outdoor bath setup.
• Wellness Suites C and D are each 100 square meters (1,076 square feet), both with balconies and semi-outdoor baths positioned to look out at the elm.
The Gym
Access to a gym is included with every suite, bundled in with use of the wellness space and a small library.
The Wellness Space
Separate from the private saunas in each suite, the hotel has a shared wellness space - a fireplace, jacuzzi, small pool, dry sauna, and mist sauna, all set beneath a high atrium where light filters down through the elm leaves outside.
It's built around the idea of moving between heat and cold, fire and water, rather than following a set spa program - there's no treatment menu here, just the facilities to use as you like.
17-3 Funamicho, Hakodate, Hokkaido 040-0055, Japan
