A better hotel by design
T'Point, Shinsaibashi
Utilitarian business hotels
take the plea-sure out a working trip to another city. Hotel T'Point
in Osaka puts the guest first and the adventure back into travel.
I remember one business hotel in Fukuoka which
offered me for ¥7,000 yen a lightless box, in which even the
air seemed grey, and which was almost small enough to induce economy
class syndrome. The bathroom gave off a suspicious and unpleasant
odour and there was a view from the window of a neighbouring blank
wall.
For some reason, breakfast was not offered, and
your nutritional and entertainment needs were addressed by beer,
dried squid, sake and pot noodles from vending machines —
and few channels of pornography on the TV.
The most interesting feature of the room was a
book of Sutras in both Japanese and English, which was pre-sumably
placed there so the guest could cultivate the Buddhist quality of
acceptance of suffering in order to get through the stay at the
hotel.
With this experience in mind I can appreciate
what owner Junko Kakutani is doing with her unusual hotel T'Point
in Shinsaibashi.
While T'Point was created with the business traveller
in mind, it's unique atmosphere and design would make it a place
to get away from things without even leaving the Kansai.
Ms. Kakutani tells me that T'Point is a “design
hotel”. “There are many abroad, but only a few in Japan
and only one in Osaka.”
Each room is unique; each room looks and feels
different from the next; each room has it's own theme.
Ms. Kakutani teamed up with architect Yasutoshi
Mifune and stylist Seiji Sageshima to create (I choose the word
carefully) the hotel. And they had a lot of fun in the process because
the rooms all embody functionality, comfort and escapism —
and plenty of humour and imagination.
While the rooms display a keen and expert eye
for design, and are a treat to look at in themselves, they are all
designed around the guest. Creature comfort is built into the clean
lines and modernist surfaces.
Room 513 is listed as a standard single, but there
is nothing standard about it — it is like stepping into a
page of one of the more tasteful interior design magazines. Set
in one wall is a long desk built with a broad platform and a well
under the desk. The arrangement is inspired by the old fashioned
horigotatsu, which we can still find in some izakaya. The great
point of the horigotatsu design is the twin ability to sit comfortably
at the desk or loll about without changing location.
On the surface the materials and lines of rooms
like this are modern. “Look a bit further, and you find something
Japanese,” Ms. Kakutani tells me proudly.
I mentioned that the design, although modern,
had a lot to do with wabi sabi, the traditional Japanese design
concept of simplicity and of letting natural materials speak for
themselves. Her face lit up — she was delighted that I had
noticed and agreed that this was indeed true.
In other rooms that illustrate the meeting of
Japanese sensibility with modernity, the features are entirely integrated.
Put another way, there are no doors or walls to the bath or shower,
creating one space for total indulgence.
 The
visitor can lounge in the bath or on the bed and view the computer
or TV, or sit at the low table and work. Given the Japanese fondness
for the bath and its communal form, this arrangement is as logical
as it is innovative. Some of the baths are square wooden objects
very reminiscent of those traditional sake cups. In another, the
bed has been placed in a cube within the room that takes its idea
from a traditional teahouse.
I asked Ms. Kakutani what her inspiration was.
“I am creating places in which I would like to live,”
and confesses to a fantasy life of living and working in a different
room every-day. Of such whimsy are great hotels born.
Given this motivation, what are we to make of
room 213, which is essentially a very taste-ful jungle gym? You
enter to be confronted by a frame of wood that almost fills the
room, through which you pick your way to find the bed, which is
nearly two metres off the floor. The climb to the bed was an interesting
ex-perience in itself, and reclining up near the ceiling, only nearly
as vertiginous as I expected.
The eating/drinking/recreation area is a cross
between a tree house and a wooden tower and which you can occupy
both on the inside and outside. One end of the room is
a shallow concrete trough or pool filled with water, which doubles
as decoration and shower space. Ms. Kakutani points out enthusi-stically
that light reflects from the rippling sur-face of the pool and casts
rainbow patterns on the walls.
Meanwhile, in the centre of the room, a miniature
water fountain creates a constant tinkling of water. It is a room
to be experienced with all the senses and the whole body, I am told.
The design is by Mr. Mifune again and was presented at Designer's
Week in the autumn of 2002. There are no reports of anyone having
fallen off the bed.
The link with designers doesn't end with the completion
of the hotel. Every year rooms are turned over to installation artists
to with what they will, with sometimes startling results. Each art
show is an opportunity to redesign some part of the hotel so that
it is constantly evolving. Ms. Kakutani is aware that the visitor
has not just come here to look at the place.
 The
comfort of the rooms is plain, as are the escapist possibilities.
You get into your room and you can forget all about the madding
crowd. Which leads me back to my little epiphany that you don't
have to be a travelling businessperson to appreciate these spaces
— they provide an escape within Osaka, a chance to change
your environment for a night or two and pamper yourself. Though
being in the heart of hedonistic Shinsaibashi you don't have to
be of the reclusive type to appreciate T'Point.
Reservations and extras
• The double and twin rooms all have Mac computers, DVD players
and a TV too, while the standard single rooms are fitted with Windows
machines. All machines are connected to the internet. Each room
has a fridge with drinks both complimentary
and to buy — both alcoholic and non- alcoholic. Some rooms
have microwave ovens and even laundry facilities.
• Prices, inclusive of breakfast, range from ¥8,000 to
¥9,800 for the single rooms and go from ¥15,000 to ¥43,000
for the larger rooms, depending on size and the number of people
to occupy it.
• T'Point has a web site on which you can see images
of the rooms, make a selection and a reservation. The site is in
both
English and Japanese.
Hotel T'Point
1-6-28 Higashishinsaibashi, Chuo-ku
Osaka 542-0083
Tel 06-6251-7170
Fax: 06-6251-7187
http://www.tpoint.co.jp
Text: Chris Page • Photos: Taka Kataoka |
