Capsule Hotels

MyCUBE Saga applies the Japanese cabin format to a small city on Kyushu. Sleeping units are enclosed, individually lockable and stacked in quiet corridors, with a bed, a light, power and a place for a phone — the essentials, arranged carefully.

Bathing and washing are communal, in the ordinary Japanese sense: clean, well-signposted and organised so that a full house moves through without queueing. Luggage goes into lockers near reception.

The hotel sits within walking reach of central Saga, which makes it useful for travellers crossing Kyushu rather than settling in one place. It is built for a night or two, and does not pretend otherwise.

• Cabin-style rooms
• Central Saga
• Shared lounge
• Compact format

Z Holborn is a micro-room hotel a few minutes from Chancery Lane, in the stretch of London between the City and the West End. Rooms are small by design — a bed, a compact ensuite, a screen, storage worked into the walls — and priced against location rather than floor area.

The brand's argument is straightforward: in central London, most guests are out all day, and a smaller room in the right postcode beats a larger one further away. The execution is tidier than the category usually manages, with proper blackout, decent linen and reliable soundproofing.

Downstairs there is a small lounge and a daily wine-and-cheese hour that has become something of a signature. Breakfast is light. Everything else is the neighbourhood's job.

• Micro-rooms
• Central London
• Wine and cheese hour
• Compact ensuites

The Hoxton's Portland hotel occupies a 1906 building in Old Town, and it belongs in this category for a specific reason: the smallest of its room tiers are genuinely compact, deliberately so, with the space the guest loses reinvested in the floors below.

Those ground floors work as public rooms. A lobby that functions as a workspace by day, a restaurant, a bar upstairs with a view over the river and the bridges — the hotel treats them as the real living space and the bedrooms as somewhere to sleep.

The interiors lean warm: timber, tile, brass, and furniture chosen to survive constant use. It is a compact-room hotel without the clinical edge the format sometimes carries.

• Old Town
• Tiered room sizes
• Public ground floor
• 1906 building