BEST TIMESHARE

Not A Hotel, Japan, by Shinji Hamauzu and Suppose Design Office

- JENS H JENSEN

When Shinji Hamauzu quit working for Zozo Group, one of Japan’s leading fashion retailers, in early 2020, he told his friends he wanted to go into the hotel business. Everyone advised him against it. ‘This was in the middle of Tokyo’s Covid lockdown and everyone thought I was crazy,’ he says. Hamauzu persevered. He wasn’t planning on ‘just’ building and running yet another hotel. He wanted to do things differently, and to highlight this, and partly in jest, he named his new venture ‘Not A Hotel’.

‘It was important to signify that we were completely different from your regular hotel,’ Hamauzu explains. ‘The usual route to building a hotel is to secure funding, build, and then start selling rooms by the day and hope for a good occupancy rate.’ But instead, Hamauzu intended to treat each ‘room’ as a timeshare, selling it to 12 people, each getting 30 days’ worth of use. He also planned to first find a great location and get a well-known architect to design the property, and then sell the timeshares online off the back of renderings and drawings. Only when the capital had been secured would construction begin.