Love hotel renovation turns love shack into designer condo

We recently heard about how one down and out old love hotel got a face lift and a whole new lease of life.

Tokyo Style CC, a company which organizes building renovations, chose a love hotel in Sumidagawa, east Tokyo, for its next project.

If you ever fancied living in a love hotel, Tokyo Style CC is offering customized rooms for you, not mentioned amazing views of the Tokyo Sky Tree.

Love hotels are of course the short-stay places where couples can go for some “rest time”, as it is euphemistically advertised.

Although Shibuya and its “love hotel hill” are likely the most famous for foreigners, there are actually far more hotels in more dubious areas like Nippori.

And despite the whole “east Tokyo boom” courtesy of the Sky Tree, Bakurocho art gallery district et al, these hotels are in poor shape and surely rather uninviting to the younger couples of the capital.

This particular cramped hotel (it’s not named) was in not in any large hotel cluster but just tucked away on a street in Shitamachi. It was all by itself and just a short, tempting distance from Asakusa.

There were few windows but what it lacked in natural light, it made up for in flair, especially its red bath tubs!

The renovation was a big job. Water would leak in when it rained and the whole building needed attention, including the out-dated hot water system.

Tokyo Style CC actually employed a kind of crowdsourcing approach, at least in terms of skills, publicly recruiting artists and designers to paint “something” exciting on the outside wall of the former hotel.

You can see the results below…

The walls have been painted with a pop art “paintbrush strokes” motifs. Each room has been individually designed and now the roof has also been opened up so you can pop up to get a great view of the Sky Tree.

The giveaway “wall of discretion” which masks love hotel entrances has been stylishly half-cut away. And now the main outside wall has some vibrant Roy Lichtenstein-esque colors.

The price for a room? It varies a bit per apartment but the average is currently around ¥70,000 (c.$900) a month.