How much would you pay for a package that includes the following: falling asleep at the top of a floating sphere that drifts atop the sea and then waking up on the shore of a private island filled with theme park–style rides?
Well, if all goes according to plan, you should be paying anywhere from ¥30,000 to ¥40,000 an evening, and you may be able to try out this odd, but awfully cool hotel experience by the end of the year. This is the latest idea to spring from the wildly inventive minds at Huis Ten Bosch. The Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, based hotel company owns a 39,000 square meter island not far from the main hotel grounds, and they are already building rides and attractions on the uninhabited land. As far as we know, visiting the island will not be limited to guests of the “floating rooms.”
The spheres look a bit like the top of R2-D2’s head and will have about 38 square meters of floor space, should have room for four, feature a sleeping area at the top of the two-story floating structure. According to the Japan Times, the hotel intends to build 20 to 30 of the floating rooms by year’s end.
Huis Ten Bosch, which is owned by the H.I.S. travel agency, is a hotel and theme park that recreate the appearance of towns in Holland, as a nod to the influence that Dutch traders had on the region from the 17th century onward. They’re also no strangers to creative and clever accommodation ideas that put a new spin on the hotel experience: just in the last few years, they’ve unveiled a reptile petting exhibition, a hotel staffed entirely by robots, and theater specifically intended to make people cry.
Image: Huis Ten Bosch via Kyodo/Mainichi Shimbun
