Suite 01
citizenM Shinjuku
Tokyo, Japan
citizenM Shinjuku applies the group's established formula to one of Tokyo's busiest districts. The rooms are compact and near-identical, built around a wall-to-wall bed, with lighting, blinds, temperature and television handled from a single tablet. There is no wardrobe worth the name and no desk to speak of; the trade is explicit and most guests accept it happily.
Everything the room gives up reappears downstairs. The ground floor runs as a large living room — mismatched designer seating, long tables, a canteen open around the clock, shelves of books nobody pretends are only decorative. Shinjuku station is close enough that the hotel functions as a base for the whole city rather than a place to spend the afternoon. Check-in is done at a screen in under a minute, which suits the kind of traveller who books here.
- Compact fixed-layout rooms
- Tablet room controls
- 24-hour ground-floor canteen
- Minutes from Shinjuku station
Suite 02
Hotel MyCUBE Osaka
Osaka, Japan
Hotel MyCUBE Osaka belongs to the newer generation of Japanese capsule hotels — the ones that kept the efficiency of the original model and quietly dropped its austerity. Sleeping units are enclosed cubes rather than open-fronted tubes, each with a lockable panel, its own light and a power point within arm's reach. The result is closer to a small private berth than to a shared dormitory.
Bathing and changing happen on communal floors, as they do across the format, and the house rules about noise and lights-out are taken seriously. Storage is handled by full-height lockers rather than by the cube itself, so the sleeping space stays uncluttered. For a night or two in central Osaka, at a fraction of a conventional room rate, the arrangement is hard to argue with.
- Enclosed cube sleeping units
- Shared bathing floors
- Full-height locker storage
- Central Osaka position
Suite 03
The Pod Hotel Chelsea
New York, New York, United States
The Pod hotels were New York's most convincing answer to the question of what a capsule hotel becomes when it is translated to a Western city, and the Chelsea property is the clearest expression of it. Rooms are genuinely small — some built around a bunk, some around a single queen bed — with joinery doing the work that floor area usually does. Every surface folds, slides or doubles as something else.
Some room types share bathrooms along the corridor, which keeps the lowest rates genuinely low; others are self-contained. The building leans on its common areas to compensate, with a rooftop that earns its keep in warm months and a ground-floor space that stays busy into the evening. Chelsea itself does the rest: galleries to the west, the elevated park a few blocks away, and subway lines in most directions.
- Micro rooms with built-in joinery
- Bunk and queen layouts
- Shared or private bathroom options
- Rooftop common space