Capsule Hotels

Four Japanese capsule hotels, each with a different idea of what a compartment is for.

The capsule hotel is a format with rules: a compartment rather than a room, shared washing, lockers away from the sleeping floor, quiet enforced by convention as much as by construction. Within those rules there is more variation than the format's reputation suggests.

One of the four below sells a measured sequence of hours. One borrows the language of aircraft cabins inside an airport terminal. One gives most of its floor area to a shared lounge. One hides its beds inside a library wall.

Nine Hours Shinjuku-North

Tokyo, Japan

The nine hours of the name are the ones the hotel proposes to sell you: an hour to wash, seven to sleep, an hour to dress. Everything in the building is arranged around that sequence.

Sleeping pods are moulded units stacked in two tiers along quiet corridors, separated by floor for men and women, with lockers and showers held apart from the sleeping area so that noise and traffic stay away from it.

The visual language is severe — white, grey, pictograms, almost no signage in words — and it is severe on purpose, since the hotel expects guests who arrive late and leave early.

First Cabin Haneda Terminal 1

Tokyo, Japan

Set inside Haneda Airport's Terminal 1, this is a capsule hotel that borrows the vocabulary of aircraft cabins: compartments are called First Class and Business Class, and the larger of the two gives a standing-height room with a proper bed.

Walls are solid, the fourth side closed by a screen or curtain rather than a door, which keeps it legally a capsule while feeling closer to a small cabin.

Its usefulness is chiefly a matter of geography. Early departures and late arrivals are the reason most people come, and communal baths are the reason some of them come back.

The Millennials Kyoto

Kyoto, Japan

A capsule hotel in central Kyoto, a short walk from the Shijo-Kawaramachi crossing, built around units the hotel calls Smart Pods — each with a bed that reclines into a sofa, controlled from a lent handset.

Communal space is given more room than is usual in the format: a long shared lounge and work area occupies much of the ground floor, and the hotel runs on the assumption that guests will spend their waking hours there rather than in the pod.

It reads less as a place to hide and more as a place to work, which for a certain kind of traveller is the point.

Book and Bed Tokyo Shinjuku

Tokyo, Japan

The device is simple and consistently applied: a wall of bookshelves, and the beds are behind the books. Guests climb into compartments set into the shelving, so the shelf is both library and structure.

The library runs to a few thousand volumes in Japanese and English, chosen for browsing rather than reference, and the lights stay usable for reading late.

It is frank about what it is — accommodation attached to an idea — and the Shinjuku branch has the city's lights close at hand through the windows.