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A Whole House to Yourself: The Ultimate Solo Stay in Japan
Solo yakiniku, solo karaoke: and this, I think, is the final form. Renting a whole-house stay, alone. Using a house that sleeps four all by yourself is, on paper, luxury taken too far. But the value of a solo stay lies not in the space. It lies in the absence of negotiation.
What time to have dinner: you ask no one. How low to dim the lights, whether to play music or keep the silence, how many baths to take. The dozens of small acts of consensus that come with a travel companion drop to zero. And that quiet is different from a room you live in alone. A home is soaked in the presence of chores and work; a rented house on a trip carries none of it. Time that is purely your own runs, undiluted, from check-in to check-out.
There are three tricks to choosing a place for a solo stay. 1. If the property charges per person, the bill stays predictable even for one. 2. With unstaffed check-in, conversation can be kept at zero to the very end. 3. One piece of “equipment that keeps your hands busy,” a sauna or a fire pit, keeps the long evening from going flat.
Alone in a cave on the cape: Villa Santorini, Kochi
An Aegean-style resort standing on the cape of Usa in Tosa, Kochi. Blue domes, white walls, and cave-style rooms carved into the cliff, looking out over the Pacific. Take a room that sleeps three for yourself, and the white cave and the horizon are entirely your own. The foreign-looking scenery makes the out-of-the-ordinary feeling of traveling alone run one level deeper.
Holed up in a gorge with zero conversation: Keikoku Glamping Tent, Hinohara
A glamping stay of two freestanding private villas along a gorge in Hinohara Village, Tokyo. There is a wood-fired sauna overlooking the clear stream and a fire pit, and unstaffed check-in means you can settle in with no small talk at all. Two hours from central Tokyo buys you a weekend in which you exchange words with no one. Feed the stove, watch the flames, listen to the river: the handwork of a solo night is all here.
An onsen dome at a per-person rate: Otaru Hanaemi
An onsen glamping site at Asarigawa Onsen in Otaru, Hokkaido, limited to three groups per day. You sleep in a heated and air-conditioned dome designed after a kamakura snow hut, and dinner is a BBQ of Hokkaido-raised jingisukan grilled lamb. Rates from 13,000 yen per person bring the psychological hurdle of a solo stay right down. A private wood-stove sauna and the waters of Asarigawa Onsen warm the close of a night spent alone.
The opposite of “such a waste”
Say you are renting a whole house for yourself, and someone will tell you it is a waste. But if it buys you 24 hours of accommodating no one, it is not squandered space. It may be time at its highest efficiency. As a once-a-year reward to yourself, try booking the ultimate solo stay.