Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 182

Space comes at a premium in Tokyo. So today, let's take a look at our hotel room, including some of its dimensions. The smallest room in our hotel is 12 m2 (~129 ft2). But we sprung for the 20 m2 (~215 ft2) room given that we have two big ski/snowboard bags with us.

When you walk into our room, there is a foyer where you naturally remove your outside shoes and put on your inside shoes. There's also a continuous hook for hanging coats, which seems to be a common detail throughout Tokyo. This area measures 1060mm (3'5") wide by 2119mm (6'11") deep and has a clear height of 2170mm (7'1").

You then step up to the main room area, which has tatami flooring throughout. It's obvious that you shouldn't cross this threshold with your outside shoes on. Here the clear height compresses down to 2069mm (6'9") because of the raised floor and because of some HVAC above. I wonder if there are any services running under the floor. Presumably they made use of the space.

The toilet/shower room is 1886mm (6'2") wide by 1235mm (4'0") deep and has the same ceiling height as above. As expected, the toilet is very fancy, it has a heated seat, and it will do whatever it takes to ensure that you leave this compact room with a tidy bum. The control pad is also fairly intuitive to use.

The main living/sleeping area of the room is 2783mm (9'1") wide by 3351mm (10'11") deep, which is roughly the size of a Toronto apartment bedroom. This room also has a TV, desk area, and the bathroom sink. The ceiling height opens up to 2395mm (7'10") in this area.

It's worth highlighting that the desk height is just under 24" and the vanity countertop height is about 26". These are very low compared to Western standards and I can certainly feel it in my back.

In my view, it's this vertical dimension which represents the biggest design difference compared to what I'm accustomed to. Surfaces are low and the ceiling heights are compressed. Because otherwise, I've stayed in even smaller rooms in Paris and in other places. It's very comfortable and we would certainly stay here again .

We arrived in Tokyo late last night. Our departure was delayed by a few hours, but we ended up sleeping most of the flight, and so we landed relatively refreshed and ready to tackle all of the late-night snacks at the closest 7-11.

The onboarding process for taking the train into the city was as easy as it could have been. I was able to add and then load their Suica card directly from Apple Wallet. ( Thanks for the tips , everyone.)

Here's us, taking up too much room on the train with our two ski/snowboard bags.

However, I will say that Shinjuku station -- which is the busiest train station in the world , by far -- is just as confusing as I remember it. Between the vastness of the station and overall network, and the language barrier, it can be a real challenge to figure out where to go to make your connection.

But ultimately, we made it to our hotel, and to 7-11. In case you're wondering, and to give you an idea of scale, my legs absolutely hang off the end of these beds.

I have no idea what the circular thing was in this bowl, but it was good, hot water was readily available in the store for these purposes, and I was able to supercharge the entire thing with some charcoal-grilled chicken from a separate package.

The first time I visited Japan, I had a cell phone with one of the first ever color screens. I thought this was a huge deal. And, I had a standalone digital camera that was about the size of a small wallet. I also thought this was a huge deal. Sadly, I'm not sure where most of these photos are today (though I still have the phone).

So it's exciting to me that I'm now writing posts and sharing photos with all of you on a decentralized and open ledger that is intended to act as permanent information storage . In theory at least, these posts and these photos will be around forever, even if Paragraph as a company goes away.

Which means I'll be able to look back on the above photo and remind myself that I took it from the window above my hotel bed when I woke up at 530AM, I couldn't sleep, and I decided to just get up and write today's post. Tokyo is such an awesome city. It's great to be back after all these years.

I am currently sitting in CDG and running on somewhere between 3-4 hours of sleep. We spent the entire day in Paris on a layover and are now waiting to board for Tokyo . So today's post is going to be two quick announcements related to Junction House. One, we just received the final architectural photos from Double Space Photography , and they turned out great. If you'd like to take a look, most of them can be found here . And two, we just listed suite 607 . It's a spacious two-storey and two-bedroom suite, and one of the best in the building. Over the last few months, we've been seeing strong demand from end users (as opposed to investors) and I'm sure this one will go that way as well. For much of the last cycle, it was frankly easier and more profitable to just target investors. But I would argue that the opposite is true today. And that's a positive thing for the market.

Cover photo: Double Space Photography