This new budget getaway in Tokyo is turning the page on conventional hostel concepts.
Rather than inviting customers to sleep on the crowded bunks you can find in most facilities, the people behind the hostel (which include real estate boutique R-Store and architecture/design studio Suppose Design) have instead made nooks and crannies in bookshelves where guests can curl up, all the better to read and doze off in.
Book and Bed hostel will be located on the Lumiere building’s 7th floor, in the Nishi Ikebukuro neighborhood of Toshima-ku. The facility is lined with a library’s worth of fully stocked shelves, some of which have beds located behind them, others which house sleeping capsules where guests can rest inside. Several hardcover and paperback titles are strung up from the ceiling, hanging and bobbing back and forth slightly in a way, according to a post on Mentalfloss, that “makes them appear as if they’re gliding overhead.”
Book and Bed will have 1,700 English and Japanese books and comics that customers can thumb through for free, and the Japanese library hostel plans to double that total of titles in the near future. However, those books are not for sale: they can only be read on the premises, which might encourage some visitors to return, and could boost the venue’s potential to become a cafe or hangout spot for locals as well as a place for travelers to sleep.
Customers who are looking to spend the night at Book and Bed hostel can reserve one of its cozy bunks now for ¥3,500 to ¥4,500 per night, depending on the size they choose. Visitors who just want to hang around for a few hours during the day can do so for ¥1,500 between 13:00 and 19:00 The hostel’s website is very frank about what it is offering, calling itself an “an accommodation bookshop” and admitting that it lacks the fluffy luxury of five star accommodations in Tokyo – or private bathrooms and showers. Instead, it touts its specialization in delivering “An experience shared by everyone at least once: the blissful ‘instant of falling asleep.’ It is already 2 am but you think just a little more … with heavy drooping eye lids you continue reading only to realize you have fallen asleep.”
–Kyle Mullin
Images: Book and Bed
