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With just over 80 square meters of front parking space between the two buildings, it doesn’t sound like an obvious location for a new hotel – even in building-heavy Tokyo. However, this compact footprint served as the springboard for Hotel Rakuragu, a unique tall and narrow contemporary building that rises nine stories high among its neighbors in the Nihonbashi district.
Slim Hotel Rakuragu
The new 14-room hotel, which opened in early March, was created by Tokyo and Shanghai-based studio Kooo Architects, with a design rooted in a deep sensitivity to its compact city center location.
The tall white structure is simple and abstract, with a lantern-like facade irregularly scattered with cutout windows and angular balconies, each positioned to maximize natural light and protect privacy from surrounding buildings.
“This kind of hotel can only appear in Japan,” Yang Ailu of AM Limited Company, the new hotel’s owner, told Wallpaper*. “We want guests to feel a sense of inner peace when staying at this hotel, as if they were in a modern temple.”
The hotel features a minimalist white aesthetic both inside and out. The 60.66-square-meter building is located on a low-key back street in Nihonbashi. Two white sloping columns sit at its base like an abstract piece of art – a clue to its structural form, and are constructed using braced and rigid frames. Reinforced.
“The construction site itself is quite small,” Kooo Architects co-founder Shinya Kojima told Wallpaper*. “But by looking at the shape of the buildings on either side and the shape of the buildings on the opposite side of the site, we were able to easily find directions for each floor to open outward, even in densely built areas.”
Ayaka Kojima, co-founder of Kooo Architects, added: “The first main feature of the building is its structural form, which was designed to give the building the characteristic appearance of a hollowed-out white rectangle. There are no pillars on the balconies so as not to block guests’ views.
“There is a rhythm to the façade: some balconies on each floor have sides cut out into triangles, while some have large balconies on the entire front. This allows a certain degree of freedom in the arrangement of the columns.
After entering, the simple lobby space, with white walls, concrete floors, gray seats and white front desk, is simple, modern and practical. There is also an oval mirror sculpture hovering around another white pillar – —This is a custom piece of art created by a designer. Tokyo design studio We+.
An elevator takes guests to the upper floors, where there are just one or two rooms each, ranging in size from a compact 13 square meters to a more spacious 35 square meters, many with plant-filled balconies or large cutout windows.
Despite its austere foundation, the room’s textures, materials and color palette have a contemporary softness – from the diatomaceous earth wallpaper and curved edges at all corners to the woven gray rug, low wooden bed platform, circular Mirrors and light curtains.
The building’s unique DNA is also present throughout; scattered angular white floor-to-ceiling columns, which have the functional role of supporting the building, are transformed into architectural features in many of the guest rooms.
“We tried to design the layout and select materials so that guests can sleep comfortably and wake up in the morning sunshine,” says Shinya Kojima. “For this reason, diatomaceous earth wallpaper was used on the walls, the idea being that light can also be felt through the texture of the wallpaper.”
A musical theme also quietly underpins the hotel – from the name (“ragtime” in Japanese) to the jazz soundtrack in the lobby (there are also plans to access in-room playlists and jazz event ticket sales via QR codes).
ko-oo.jp
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