Four micro-hotels with big experiences

With property often sold and rented in reference to the square metre, it’s difficult to separate space from quality of experience. But this isn’t always the case. Super-small hotel rooms can sometimes be unfairly associated with low quality and low privacy. When realised with style and luxury, however, the experience level rises as the square metres drop.

For others, meanwhile, it’s more about the location – whether that’s in the heart of the city, filling up on culture; a moment’s stroll from the beach, feeling the salt-soothing air in their lungs or nestled in the cradle of the Earth, amongst the greenest of greens she has to offer. Here are four hotels offering small-scale stays, with large-scale experiences.

Capsule hotels are more than just gimmickry for lovers of space-age sci-fi. One-night-only business or passing-through visitors need little more than a shower and a comfortable bed for the night. At hotelier brand Nine Hours’ capsule hotel in Osaka, that’s exactly what they get.

Although common on westerners’ bucket lists, the capsule hotel concept is often positioned at the budget end of the spectrum in Japan, overlooking comfort. Instead, Nine Hours Osaka is all about the experience. From a friendly reception area and waiting lounge, visitors are encouraged through a dark and mysterious ‘prologue corridor’, enhancing anticipation. Once through, they enter gender-specific sanitary lounges where high-quality surfaces allow them to properly decompress in comfort, before passing through to the quiet, calming capsule area.

Having grown up with the space- and time-saving benefits technology allows, younger generations have little use for the space of an average hotel room. What is important to them, however, is style, environmental awareness and a location where the action is – be that sun, sand or nightlife. And those are the focal points of the WOM Allenby Hotel in Tel-Aviv.

‘We founded WOM with the belief that we could change the way the travel world uses space,’ says Gerstner Architects, who believe designer shouldn’t mean expensive. By splitting the interior of each room, one single bed is placed above another to share the vertical space, but the two remain accessible only from neighbouring rooms. The result is twin rooms using no more space than their single counterparts. ‘WOM provides comfort and a sense of style, designed for the modern traveller’s essential needs,’ says Gerstner, fitting a small desk, sink and storage into each room, along with TV screens and sound systems made possible with impressive cellulose insulation in between rooms.

For tourists in love with nature rather than the city, you can’t get much more natural than Costa Rica. Beautiful wild beaches look across both the Pacific and the Atlantic, yet are matched in beauty by lush, green rainforests, volcanoes and the bio-diverse wildlife found further inland.

If glamping is camping with dialled-up luxury, then the outdoor Coco Art Villas twist the dial right off. Inspired by the high trails and zip lines in the Costa Rican jungle, and set in the middle of the forest, dotted along a series of raised walkways and platforms, the accommodation pods themselves look like over-grown exotic plant-life on an alien planet.

Each villa’s pared-down interior includes only a bed, pedestal, bath and shower, while the rest of the stay is spent at one with the environment – with a shared luxury kitchen and dining space, activities such as gym, massage, sauna, yoga and art workshops, a playroom for the little ones and a trampoline for the big little ones all a short trek away.

These silo-shaped hotel cabins in Bandung, Indonesia, seem relatively palatial in comparison to those above. By twisting a staircase around the inner circumference, however, they can double up each of the Blackbird Hotel’s Drum Rooms’ minimal 15 sqm of floorspace to offer newlyweds a luxurious, yet private, honeymoon.

By clever use of skylights, circling around the roof’s edge and above a standalone bathtub; perforated metal sheets, filtering light down from the roof, through the stairwell and into the bedroom underneath and angled wooden grills, natural light is invited in to fill the romantic space, but sight lines are kept out.

© Architonic