Love Hotel by Kyoichi Tsuzuki is a photographic record of a disappearing Japanese building typology — the garish, inventive, and deeply idiosyncratic love hotel — documented before stricter laws erased it from the cityscape entirely.
About This Book
By the 2000s, Japan's love hotels — those extravagant, often surreal spaces designed for transient intimacy — were vanishing under the pressure of tightened legislation and shifting moral codes. Tsuzuki's lens turns toward what remained: a retro-kitsch interior architecture defined by excess, fantasy, and a total disregard for restraint. Each carefully selected room reads as a distinct spatial proposition, a collision of themed decor, mirrored surfaces, and playful excess that no mainstream design discourse would have thought to document. For students of vernacular architecture, Japanese visual culture, or the history of interior design, this is an irreplaceable record of a typology that existed entirely on its own terms.
Key Features
- 448 pages of colour photography documenting love hotel interiors across Japan
- Published by Seigensha
What You'll Discover
- How Japanese love hotel interiors developed a distinct spatial language — theatrical, maximalist, and entirely separate from mainstream interior design conventions
- The cultural and legislative pressures that accelerated the disappearance of this building typology in the early 2000s
- The range of themed room designs that characterised the typology, from the playfully kitsch to the genuinely bizarre
- Tsuzuki's documentary approach as a form of architectural preservation — capturing spaces that no longer exist in their original form
About the Author
[Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 448
- Dimensions: 115 x 105 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9784861529252
- Publisher: Seigensha
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and designers interested in vernacular and themed interior architecture, researchers in Japanese visual culture, and anyone documenting disappearing building typologies.