Capsule Hotels

The Capsule Hotel, Sydney, NSW.

A capsule hotel sells a bed in a moulded berth, not a room, and this one does not pretend otherwise. Capsules are stacked along corridors, each closing with a screen or a door rather than a wall, with a light, a socket and enough headroom to sit up. Bathrooms are shared and down the hall.

The format came from Japan, where it solved a specific problem: a bed near a station for someone who missed a train. Sydney has borrowed the format for a different set of guests, mostly people who want a city-centre address for a night without the price of a room they will only sleep in.

What makes it worth listing is the discipline of the design. Everything is worked out to the centimetre, because there is no spare centimetre. Storage sits under or beside the berth, the corridors are narrow by design, and the common area does the work a lobby and a lounge would do in a larger hotel.

It is the smaller idea of the two hotels in this section, and the more traditional reading of the format. If you have stayed in a capsule in Osaka, you will recognise the plan immediately. What has changed in the crossing is the guest: fewer commuters, more travellers with a bag and an early flight.

The Pod Sydney, Sydney, NSW.

The Pod Sydney takes the same starting point as its neighbour in this section and reads it slightly differently. The unit is a pod rather than a bunk: an enclosed sleeping space with its own light and power, arranged in rows, with bathrooms and a common area shared by the floor.

The appeal is location for a night. A capsule hotel earns its place by being in the middle of a city where a room costs what a room costs, and by asking guests to give up everything except the bed and the address. Everything the format removes is something you would not use between eleven at night and seven in the morning.

Because there are no windows in most capsules, the lighting inside does the work of morning and evening, and that is worth knowing if you sleep badly in the dark. Guests who need to work, spread out or keep unusual hours are better served elsewhere, and the hotel does not argue otherwise.

Two hotels is a short section. We would rather run a short section than pad it with hostels, which are a different format with different rules, and there are only a handful of true capsule hotels in Australia to describe.