Capsule Hotels

A cabin is a small room with a door or a shutter, on a ship, in an aircraft or on land, fitted out for one person to sleep or sit in. The word carries the idea of a compartment inside a larger vessel: you are in your own space, and the vessel around you is shared.

What it names here

This house calls its rooms cabins and grades them the way an airline grades seats, with a larger class and a smaller one. It is one address of a chain with several branches, and this branch stands near the old market quarter. A screen closes the entrance rather than a locking door.

Where the word comes from

English cabin comes through French from a late Latin word for a hut, and it moved onto ships early. The chain's use of it, together with the class names, is a deliberate borrowing from air travel and is the wording it uses in English.

How the house uses it

Because the compartment is not sealed, sound is managed by house rules rather than by construction: quiet hours, no talking on the floors, shoes and luggage left outside the sleeping area. Baths and lounges are on separate floors.

A sauna is a room heated dry and hot, with benches at different heights and stones that take water. You sit in it, you leave it, you cool down, and you go back. The building around it has to supply that cycle: heat, water, somewhere cold, somewhere to sit afterwards.

What it names here

This house is a capsule hotel built around its bathing part rather than beside it. The sauna and the washing rooms are the reason the address is known, and the sleeping capsules are stacked on the floors above and below. It is one address of a chain whose other branches are run differently.

Where the word comes from

Sauna is a Finnish word taken into English and into Japanese without translation. In Japan it now names a bathing culture with a vocabulary of its own and establishments of its own, of which this house is one.

How the house uses it

The cycle sets the plan: changing room, washing places, hot room, cold water, then a room to sit in. Towels and clothing are handed out, so guests move between floors without their luggage, and the capsules stay for sleeping only.

A capsule is a sealed unit made as one piece and then installed. In a hotel it is the sleeping berth: a moulded shell holding a mattress, a light, a screen and a socket, closed at the end by a blind. The units are set in rows in a shared room and stacked two high.

What it names here

This house is one of the older addresses of the form in the city, and its rooms are capsules of exactly that kind, placed side by side in a common area. Bathing and washing are shared, on other parts of the floor, and a sauna, laundry and reception run day and night.

Where the word comes from

The word came to hotels from engineering, where a capsule is a self-contained unit fitted into a larger structure. Japanese architects used it in that sense before the first capsule hotel opened, and the English term followed the buildings abroad.

How the house uses it

Because the unit is manufactured rather than built, the room around it is simply a frame holding rows of them, and everything else in the house is shared: lockers for luggage, a bathing area, and a lounge to sit in with shoes off.

A lounge is a room for sitting in that belongs to nobody in particular. It has chairs, tables, light and power, and no purpose fixed to a time of day. In a building where private space is small, the lounge is where the hours that are not sleeping hours are actually spent.

What it names here

This house keeps lounges on the men's and women's floors, free to the guests of those floors and open around the clock, along with a powder area kept open the same way. Entry to each sleeping floor is through a gate, so the lounge on your floor is the room you can use without passing a barrier.

Where the word comes from

Lounge is English, first a verb about standing about idly and later the room where that is done. Japanese has taken the word in, and hotels of this kind use it in both languages for the shared sitting room.

How the house uses it

Because the sleeping unit holds no desk and no chair, work, meals and waiting all move into the lounge, and the bathing floors sit apart from it, one of them in the basement and one high up in the building.