I was quite looking forward to these accommodations that Jane booked for us in London. It was Coryndon’s suggestion, which I enthusiastically supported. It may have lost its luster had we stayed longer, but at the moment, I thought I could have enjoyed staying in one of these for the entire trip.

The Yotel is built into the terminal in Heathrow right across from a decent bar / restaurant. The idea is luxury that is conveniently located but affordable by having super compact rooms. There was a note from the founder of the company that mentioned being inspired by some compact hotels in Japan.

There’s a futuristic automatic sliding glass door to the lobby. The corridor is illuminated with purple ambient lighting that makes it feel like a cross between Star Trek and a rave in which everyone has gone to sleep. Entrances to the rooms are staggered with either two steps up or two steps down to the door. We each had a standard cabin which seemed to measure about twelve square meters – a difficult size to photograph, but the fisheye lens I got for Christmas proved useful here (thanks, Nancy).

Here’s the view from right inside the door. The bathroom is on the right. The loft bed on the left has some inaccessible space below it, which I believe is the space for the bed from the adjacent room – so the two essentially form a bunk bed separated by a wall. An additional ledge / towel rack is overhead, and there’s a coat hanger that no one would likely want to steal because it forms a loop around the rod that sticks straight out from the opposite wall.

The best view in the house is atop the loft bed. There’s also a flat screen television at the foot of the bed, which could be handy if one is into that sort of thing. I was just glad they had free Wi-Fi.

The room makes great use of vertical space: abundant ledges offere places to store small items.

In the center is a desk that folds out from the wall.

The desk pairs nicely with a folding stool that hangs on the door.

However, one clear design flaw that I found was that the folding desk just barely interferes with the ledge that folds down to form a step up to the bed. This could have been avoided with an adjustment on the order of a centimeter or two (I’m trying to use the metric system here).

The entire bathroom, including the smallest sink I’ve ever seen, is located inside the shower.

I didn’t get to use the shower for three reasons. First, I tried to maximize my time during this short stop between exploring London and sleeping. Second , I haven’t ridden a bicycle since the last time I took a shower, which is unusual, so I don’t perceive myself to be as dirty as I would otherwise. Third, there was no shampoo or bath soap provided in the room. I might have asked for it at the lobby, had it not been for the first and second reasons. Anyhow, I noticed that the shower head pointed straight down, which was another nice space-saving trick.

I couldn’t tell whether this was an accident or a helpful constraint, but one could not flush the push-button toilet without closing the lid to reveal the button on the wall.

If it was intentional, it was very clever because it would have prevented anything placed above from falling in.

The light switches displayed nice natural mapping: the left switch controlled the light in the bed area. The center one was for a purple ambient light located centrally on the wall, and the right switch operated the bathroom lights. Once I got used to the European convention of “switch down = on”, it was intuitive. I couldn’t figure out what the knob above did though.

Lighting was well-considered. When I first entered, the room was illuminated with only the purple light, which set a relaxing mood. It was a bit difficult to find the light switches at first since they’re not close to the door, but the positioning was smart otherwise because they could be reached easily from either the bed or the desk area. The lights were either recessed or hidden behind ledges and set up to reflect off the ceiling. With all the operable lights turned off, a faint night light provided enough illumination to make sure I didn’t bump my head on anything, but it was hardly noticeable from the bed since it is tucked away the way it is.

The rooms do an impressive job at sound insulation. I didn’t hear anything from the adjacent rooms the entire time I was there, and I know at least one of them was occupied (by Coryndon). Brandon (located on the other side of Coryndon’s room) mentioned that his alarm had been on snooze for a couple of hours, but Coryndon said he didn’t hear a thing. I could hear some noise in the hallway from the cleaning crew although the staff does seem to make a point to keep quiet in the hallways (and their shirts even say “shhh”).

The experience overall felt like being in a very comfortable airplane. Farewell, Yotel. It was a fun 14 hours.