Capsule Hotels: four hotels

The house has one route in. Guests returning at night leave their shoes and their clothes, wash at the taps, and get into the shared bath before going up to a capsule. Nobody skips it, so the bath is the one part of the night that every person in the building has in common.

The bath is on a lower floor of the building in Umeda, central Osaka, below the decks of capsules. It is a plain tiled room with washing places along the wall and a single deep pool. The capsule floors above are corridors of berths, and quiet is kept along them.

Because the washing is shared and the sleeping is not, the building has one room where people meet and none at all after it. A guest sees the whole house for a quarter of an hour and then disappears into a berth.

Before the guests return, the house is turned over. Linen comes off and goes back on through the cabins, the floors are gone over, and the shared bath is drained and filled again so that it stands ready. This is the Suidobashi address of the chain and it is described here on its own, not as the chain.

The building stands near Suidobashi station in central Tokyo, a narrow city block with cabin floors stacked above a lower floor holding the bath, the washing places and the lockers. Almost all of the work happens on that lower floor, while the sleeping floors above stand lit and empty.

For part of the day the house is a workroom and not lodging at all. Guests never see that side of it, and what they come back to is a building that has been reset from the bottom up in their absence.

Quiet is the thing that repeats. Once the night hour has passed, talking stops on the cabin floors, voices drop in the corridors, and doors are handled carefully. Nobody holds it alone; the floor holds it together. This is the Karasuma address of the chain and it runs to its own house rules.

The cabins stand along corridors in a building on Karasuma in central Kyoto, and they close with fabric rather than with solid doors, so nothing on those floors is soundproof. The lounge, the bath and the washing rooms are elsewhere in the building, which is where any talking goes instead.

A building with cloth walls works only while the agreement holds, and here it holds. The corridors change character completely once it starts, and a floor carrying dozens of sleeping people sounds no different from an empty one on any night.

Nothing here follows the sun. Capsules are cleaned, made up and let again as flights land and leave, so the turnover never fully stops and the corridors are busiest when the terminal is. Someone is always arriving to sleep, and someone is always getting up to fly.

The cabins are inside Mexico City International Airport itself, on a terminal floor rather than in a separate hotel building, so guests reach them without leaving the airport at all. Announcements carry through the walls, and the corridor outside the door is airport floor, with luggage and traffic moving along it.

Sleep here is measured against a departure and not against the night, so the building has no evening and no morning of its own. It is a room that resets continually while the terminal around it does the same at a larger scale.