Nakameguro & Daikanyama 中目黒

Nakameguro and Daikanyama sit on either side of a hill, one stop apart, and together form the Tokyo neighborhood most likely to appear in a Japanese lifestyle magazine. Nakameguro is the canal: the Meguro River runs in a concrete channel lined with cherry trees, and the quiet lanes along it hold coffee roasters, denim ateliers and the small restaurants that fill up with the area’s designers and TV producers. Under the elevated Toyoko line, the Koukashita development strung a 700-meter row of izakaya, a Tsutaya bookshop and a standing sake bar beneath the tracks, and the four-storey Starbucks Reserve Roastery, by Kengo Kuma, turned a riverside bend into a pilgrimage site.

Up the hill, Daikanyama is lower, greener and more expensive. T-Site, a bookshop built as three white lattice pavilions among trees, has a floor of back-issue magazines and a lounge where you can read them with a cocktail. The Hillside Terrace buildings, designed over thirty years by Fumihiko Maki, hold galleries and a Danish embassy, and the lanes toward Log Road are lined with the brands Harajuku graduated to. Walk it in a loop: Daikanyama in the morning, downhill to the river for lunch, under the tracks after dark.