Roppongi Hills
Roppongi Hills (©Mori Building Co., Ltd.)




Roppongi Hills
A place to live, work, and play (©Mori Building Co., Ltd.)
Roppongi Hills, the result of Tokyo's largest private-sector redevelopment project, opened for business on April 25 in a corner of Roppongi, one of Tokyo's trendiest districts. Far from focusing exclusively on business facilities, Roppongi Hills is a place where people can work, live, play, and study. Centered around a 54-story office building containing 380,000 square meters of floor space, the complex boasts hotels, commercial facilities, four condominiums, a broadcasting center, and much more. Roppongi Hills is expected to attract 100,000 visitors per day and, when it is completed, to become a city within a city where 2,000 people live and 20,000 people work.

Ever since the Arc Hills complex was built 17 years ago, the Roppongi district has been home to many foreign-affiliated companies. Some 80% of Roppongi Hills' office space (which occupies floors 7 to 48 of the main tower) has already been snapped up by such tenants as a major US brokerage firm. The upper floors of the building house a variety of cultural facilities, including an art gallery, a library, and an observation deck. The lower floors, meanwhile, contain a nine-screen multiplex cinema and about 200 shops, including many top Western designer boutiques. About 70 of the stores are restaurants, including a Chinese one that is so exclusive it serves only three groups of diners per day and a three-star French restaurant. As befits Roppongi, which has long been known as a place that never sleeps, many of the facilities in Roppongi Hills are open late: the observation deck and art museum until 1:00 a.m., the movie theater until 5:00 a.m. for half of the week, and the shops and restaurants until late at night.