Summertime, and the living is easy

Serviced apartments are on the rise in Osaka. KS checks the view from the top floor.

“No one moves to Los Angeles to get an apartment,” writer Robert Greene mused in a recent edition of the LA Weekly. “A really nice apartment is the mark of stunning and climactic success in Manhattan or Paris. In L.A., it's a sign of quirkiness, transition or defeat.”

Land prices in Osaka being what they are (a recent Prefectural Land Price study put the bill at ¥186,500 per square meter), acquiring a “really nice apartment” in the Kansai area is no mean feat, either. Different terms, of course, mean different things to different people: one of the more immediate (and nastier) discoveries new arrivals to Japan will make is that “mansions” and “palaces” do not necessarily connote mansion-like or palatial-style living. And although the eikaiwa (and, on a similar tack, the USJs) do an exemplary job of setting up accommodations for their new employees well in advance, they are less adept at providing support should you actually want to strike out on your own. So now, to find a place to live in Osaka — where do you start? Where the hell do you start?

The easiest answer — particularly if your starting point isn't the ubiquitous English teacher apartment — may be shacking up for a while in a furnished lodge. Furnished (or “serviced”) apartments, as the definition goes, include all amenities of home for a monthly fee, while giving you a healthy amount of space and that “home-y” feel that hotels aren't known for having. And one of the newest — and arguably, easiest on the eyes — serviced apartment complexes is Divio, a relatively new addition to the neon- and nightlife-soaked Kitashinchi scene in central Umeda.

“We make things very easy for foreigners coming from overseas,” says Divio spokesman Hiroaki Koizumi. “The housing deposit, electricity, cable TV bill, internet etc. — it's all taken care of. You really don't have to think about anything.”

Tucked away in a back alley of Kita-shinchi, Divio — the name combines the kanji for “two” and “energy” — comes off
of a wave of downtown Osaka revitalization that's seen the construction of the HEP 5 complex (1998), the Nankai Swissotel (1990) and the Sammy entertainment complex (ye of the glowing, vertical Ferris wheel) on the Dotonbori Bridge last year. While the Divio building doesn't have anything quite as pronounced as HEP's giant floating whale or Sammy's monstrous visage of good-luck god Ebisu, business has been good (“Very good,” Koizumi says) since opening in July of last year.

“Serviced apartments used to not be so popular in Osaka,” Koizumi says. “But the economy and the real estate market in Osaka — particularly Umeda — has really picked up. Not as fast as Tokyo, but still picking up.

“We are finding that a lot of Japanese businessmen come from the suburbs to use Divio as kind of a second house.”
Curious, that, because there's nothing about the apartment complex that particularly screams either “Japanese” or “business.”

A key-entry private elevator whisks you up to the four floors that make up the Divio space, a collection of 14 apartments that look like the flats you tell yourself you'd have if only your job paid a little better.

Creamy, beige walls surround neo-mod interiors (from design company Cibone) that somehow manage to simultaneously look retro, space-age and comfortably down-home. Giant flat-screen plasma televisions and kitschy, decades-old European posters overlook butter-soft leather couches and comforter-thick shag carpeting.

Truckloads of amenities and dark wood Venetian blinds highlight the bathrooms, while pristine white linen ensconces bedrooms that are probably a size bigger than most Japanese apartments. In short, it's probably nicer than the room you're reading this magazine in now.

The idea, says Koizumi, is to give people apartments that are “different from where [they] usually live. “It's not 'traditionally Japanese' on purpose,” Koizumi says. “A house that looked traditionally Japanese would, you know, for a lot of the Japanese business-people who stay here, be exactly the same as the homes they just came from. And Shinchi, after all, is an area for fun.”

Umeda's Kitashinchi area, home to a rather astonishing concentration of drinking spots and business headquarters, possibly boasts more swaying salarymen after 8pm than any location outside central Toyko; arguably no other area in Osaka is as convenient for boozing it up and partying heartily after (or, perhaps during) office hours.

“Our strength comes from our location,” Koizumi says. “It's in the center of Osaka - the best night spot.”

Though Koizumi says Divio tends to discourage celebrity clientele (“It's really not the kind of attention we're looking for”), he touts the complex as the best choice for out-of-town visitors, be they businessmen, government officials or otherwise.

“Like I said, everything is included — cable TV, internet, fax, room service — you name it,” Koizumi says. “Of course, the price is way higher [than a regular apartment], but essentially, we're bigger and cheaper than, say, a room in the Hilton.”

As they say, if you have to ask How Much, you probably can't afford it. In case you were wondering, though, the price for a month-long stay at Divio will set you back something in the area of ¥500,000. (Five zeros there, yes.) Still,
the old adage about getting what you pay for holds, and for what you pay, you get a lot: as Koizumi puts it, Divio residents enjoy “very beautiful, very well-designed, very high-value spaces.”
“The rooms are great, but they aren't what I would describe as 'fancy,'” Koizumi states. “By that, I mean that's it's not like we just threw in a bunch of fake-looking, high-end furniture. The pieces in there are very real, quiet, solid-looking; long-lasting things.
“With Divio, we're trying to create something — show something, I guess, that's uniquely Osakan.”

Divio
1-3-30 Sonezaki Kitashinchi, Kita-ku, Osaka-city, Osaka-fu
Tel: 06-6232-2077 • Email: info@divio.jp
www.divio.jp

Text: Jeff Lo • Photos: Courtesy Divio