GENOMICON

This is cool

Although there would be endless squabbling about who got the top bunk – and inevitably it would go to who ever had the most money, and lets face it people: we’re all getting a bit sick of that.

Still… really nice idea – assuming the prices matched the facilities rather than the view or the quirk-quotient.

I’ve always quite liked the idea of capsule hotels – been around in Japan for a while… and yes, even though The Fifth Element is possibly one of THE most annoying sci-fi movies ever made, they got their airplane design dead right:

This is what long-haul flights should be like. I do 20 hour flights a lot. Sitting next to someone is what makes them horrible. Separation… Please.

Capsule hotels have started to turn up (in a grudging, heel-dragging sort of way) in the West, with the advent of various trendy looking incarnations.

But I’ve tried some of these out (kindof) – the cheap ones in London were booked out, millions of years in advance and the other ones… are craftily priced so they look cheap, but when you come down to it they’re about the same price as staying at The Columbia, and at least you get to share the elevators with low-rent rock stars there.

Hotels aren’t there for your convenience. They’re there to squeeze every last penny they possibly can out of you – so in The West, anything new tends to be slight of hand for getting more money out of you… so you get all these hotels that look like they’re designed for and by web-designers, that web-designers can’t actually afford to stay in.

So anyway… here’s a Japanese version:

Which I find almost painful to look at – because I know what it is: It’s a special hell made for people with hangovers. I can feel the accumulated pain and suffocation of decades of mornings-after… and I’ve never ever been in one, but for me hotels and hangovers go hand in hand… and these look suicidally oppressive.

No. Give me a tent above the treetops, in the breeze. Please. Let me sleep.