Capsule Hotels

citizenM Lower Manhattan sits near the financial district, a short walk from the waterfront. Every room in the building is the same size and the same shape — a wall-to-wall bed, a glass bathroom pod, a window, and almost nothing else. The company builds these rooms off-site and stacks them, which is why the dimensions never vary.

A tablet by the bed runs the blinds, the lights, the colour of those lights and the television. Check-in happens at a kiosk in about ninety seconds, with staff nearby for anyone who would rather talk to a person.

The floor space the rooms give up reappears downstairs. The lobby is enormous by New York standards and stays open around the clock, furnished as a series of separate areas — reading corners, long tables, a bar — so that guests treat it as the living room the room upstairs is not.

9h nine hours works from a simple premise, stated in its own name: an hour to wash, seven to sleep, an hour to get ready. The Nagano branch applies that in a compact building close to Zenko-ji temple, useful for anyone arriving late or leaving for the mountains early.

Pods are moulded units in white, stacked two high along corridors, each with a blind, a light and a controllable ventilation slot. Showers and lockers sit on separate floors, with men and women on different levels throughout. The signage is pictographic and consistent, so the building is easy to read even at two in the morning.

There is no restaurant, no bar and no lounge to speak of. That is the point. Luggage goes in a locker, shoes come off at the entrance, and the whole place is engineered for a quiet night and a clean early start.

First Cabin borrows its vocabulary from aviation. Rooms are sold as cabins, in grades, with a First Class cabin roughly twice the footprint of a Business Class one. Nothing on the property pretends otherwise — the corridors are laid out like a fuselage and the staff describe the layout in the same terms.

Cabins have solid walls and a sliding screen rather than a locking door, so the format is legally closer to a capsule than a room. Inside there is a proper mattress, a television, a hanging rail and a shelf. It is considerably more generous than a moulded pod.

The communal bath is the feature guests mention most: a large tiled sento-style bathing room, open late, included in the rate. For a business traveller passing through Nagoya between trains, that bath does more work than a hotel bar would.