Without the Mess
The inaugural Muji Hotel is located in Shenzhen’s Upper Hills complex and features only Muji furniture and products (image: Muji).
Shenzhen, the sprawling manufacturing megacity in Southern China, just north of Hong Kong, doesn’t normally attract big firsts. Shenzheners, the majority of whom are migrants who have moved to the city for better economic opportunities, tend to look to other cultural capitals in the country with a certain envy. The flagship shopping opportunities and cultural amenities that give places like Beijing and Shanghai a cosmopolitan allure have so far passed Shenzhen by. After all, the city was invented for work.
In the 1980s, as part of Deng Xiaoping’s “opening up and reform” strategy, Shenzhen was identified as a special economic zone and despite its formidable growth since then – from 300,000 inhabitants to 20 million – it has continued to be defined by this. So the news that Muji, the Japanese retail behemoth, had chosen the metropolis to be the site of its first-ever branded hotel caught people by surprise. Was the city finally getting the cultural respect it deserved? The Japanese retailer has remained reticent so far as to why it chose Shenzhen for its 79-room hotel. When it opened in January 2018, local enthusiasm for the arrival of a much-wanted design icon was nonetheless palpable. People queued for hours to get a seat at the hotel’s Muji-branded diner. Rooms were fully booked; the shop was crammed. Muji appeared to have made a calculated bet and it was paying off.
Two weeks after the opening, I booked a night at the hotel. To air my biases from the outset, I should declare that I’m a Muji fan (probably not a surprising admission for a design writer). Last year, for example, I went on a prolonged mission to find the perfect toaster. I considered dozens of brands and models, dwelled far too long in the home appliances section of department stores, played with endless knobs and levers, and after six months of deliberation, chanced upon Naoto Fukasawa’s brilliantly minimal Muji toaster, and bought it on the spot. It is a perfect device, for which I have a loving affection that exceeds rational limits. It does exactly what Muji has been so good at doing for the past 38 years: stripping away excess to produce simple essential forms that perform well and look good in modest homes. My cramped London apartment is filled with other Muji accoutrement: a coat stand, a bookcase and translucent storage boxes. They are great because they almost disappear, providing some calm amidst the clutter.
Arguably, this effect should translate well into a hotel venture: a designed escape from distractions, an oasis of material comfort. But there is one problem: Muji Hotel is not a good hotel.
The first issue is location. The hotel seems reasonably central: it is based in Futian, the city’s central business district, not far from some of Shenzhen’s most important civic buildings, including the OMA-designed Stock Exchange and the recently opened Museum of Contemporary Art and Planning by Coop Himmelblau. However, the hotel sits within a new mega-development called Upper Hills, a project by the developers Shum Yip Land, who have stacked a mixed-use luxury village of sorts on top of a mall flanked by two super-tall towers. Getting there on foot involves a 30-minute slog from the closest metro station along a multi-lane highway and through a few pedestrian underpasses.
“If Muji is supposed to be the calming antidote to vibrant urbanism, what is the corresponding corrective to a non-place like this?”
From the ground, Upper Hills presents itself as an imposing mass. I missed the cue to take a four-storey outdoor escalator up to the mixed-use village and instead circumnavigated the development, walking under a massive elevated platform stretching for about 500m. I questioned some security guards and was guided through an anonymous fire-access corridor into the mall. After a few more escalators, I eventually wound up on the platform where the Muji Hotel sits. (The following morning, I realised my mistake: the site is really only meant to be accessed by car, as became clear when the taxi scuttled me away down the sidewalk-less ramps back onto the street.)
In Shenzhen, you can often find yourself in spaces that feel absolutely nowhere. The setting of the hotel is exactly this. Arriving at night, emerging from a shopping mall onto a windswept platform, I was presented with an image of the hotel as standalone box – albeit clearly emblazoned “Muji Hotel” and with a bustling Muji shop adjacent to it – surrounded by a desolate surface of access roads, dark silhouettes of towers in the distance and an unusually cold February chill. This desolation rings antithetical to the brand, which seems, paradoxically, to be both about big-city bustle and rural calm. Here, instead, we get a modern sense of Goddardian anomie, full of the hypertrophied concrete and steel that has come to define modern China. If Muji is supposed to be the calming antidote to vibrant urbanism, what is the corresponding corrective to a non-place like this?
The siting is admittedly a flaw in the Upper Hills masterplan; it sacrifices the intended sociability of the rest of the scheme for the serviceability of the anticipated steady stream of car-hires meant to take people to and from the hotel. The following morning, I chanced upon an unlikely access ramp around the corner, which takes you up to Upper Hills Loft, the outdoor rooftop complex of shops, studios and residences that are clearly designed to create the sense of city-ness that the hotel’s situation otherwise lacks. In 2012, the Shenzhen-based design and architecture office Urbanus, was given the surreal and harrowing task of creating this 105,000sqm mixed-use space, which sits atop a 64,000sqm shopping mall. Previously, Urbanus had conducted a number of studies on the unusual nature of cityscapes, in particular the southern China phenomenon of “urban villages”: patches of land around conurbations like Shenzhen that have grown autonomously thanks to being governed by rural village land laws that pre-date the emergence of the city. These are characterised by dense and lively streets, and walk-up apartment blocks of four to six storeys, which have served primarily to house the city’s working class.
With Upper Hills Loft, Urbanus has attempted to repackage the layered urbanism of an urban village for luxury living. The result is a strange mix of modernist box-boutiques and narrow pedestrian passages interwoven with staircases and walkways that lead to more flats and offices, peppered with references to industry (corten steel) and grassroots culture (graffiti). It is unavoidably contrived, especially as Urbanus has employed a number of tricks to try to recreate the vibrancy of the city – an intimately scaled pedestrian street network; ample outdoor sitting and public space; plentiful glazing; a mishmash of colours; and random objets trouvés – while transplanting the whole performance onto the roof of a shopping mall. Nevertheless, Upper Hills Loft has an ambience infinitely more pleasing than that of the Muji Hotel, just one service ramp away.
“At many moments, the Muji mantra struggles. The music player in the room is a brilliant idea, but without Bluetooth capability, what use is it, really?”
The setting aside, what about the actual hotel experience? In the promotional literature, Muji lays out its mission for what a hotel should be. It sounds entirely sympathetic to the company’s well-rehearsed design philosophy: reasonably priced, divested of superfluous services, yet high in quality furnishings. “For our visitors, every detail, from the texture of the towels to the layout of outlets and switches, to the restaurant menus, helps form the bedrock of a successful trip.” This is promising stuff and, in part, a stay at the Muji hotel lives up to these goals. If you want Muji design, you’ll get a lot of it. The lobby is minimal and heavy on wood. The hotel logo is tacked onto a mosaic of reclaimed timber; and you can choose to relax either on a massive log by the lifts, or on some more refined timber benches by the reception desk. In the rooms, you get even more wood – floors, furniture, and wood-art mounted on the walls, complemented by a strict off-whites. You get Muji products as well, including Fukasawa’s elegant kettle, which always seemed to me too small to be useful in a kitchen, but which is just about right for morning tea in a hotel room. The classic wall-mounted CD-player is there too and comes pre-loaded with an unlikely soundtrack of traditional Celtic music. (The same music is played in the lobby, the diner and the shop, and quickly becomes a chief point of irritation throughout the stay.)
At many moments though, the Muji mantra struggles. For instance, the music player in the room is a brilliant idea, but without Bluetooth capability, what use is it, really? (As mentioned above, nobody would voluntarily suffer through an entire album’s worth of the Celtic music.) I had to call the front desk to ask where the TV remote was, as someone had decided that the only reasonable place for such an ugly thing was shoved so far back in the bed-side cubby that it would never be found. Muji also seems to have a problem with visible plugs: to hide the TV’s power outlet, a brutal hole has been drilled into the wood floor; to conceal the CD-player’s plug, an elaborate but visible hinged panel is set into the wall. The effort of being effortless is apparent and distracting.
“The Muji Hotel offers neither the escapist fantasy at which a similarly priced luxury hotel can excel, nor the creature comforts and layered history of your own lived-in abode”
None of this is necessarily bad, but it is dull and disappointing. Gradually, one gets the sense of being cheated. The hotel’s promises of doing away with superfluous services come off as cheap. Yet for all its claims of being cheap, the Muji Hotel is actually quite expensive (a roughly evenly sized bedroom at the Hilton Shenzhen Shekou Nanhai can sometimes go for around the same price as the Muji Hotel’s ¥1,085). There’s no opportunity for in-room dining, the gym has the bare essentials and a reading room on the same floor is just another opportunity to hawk more Muji goods. And then there’s the unavoidable fact that you are sleeping next to a giant Muji superstore, and will inevitably walk away from your experience with some nicely set notepads and impeccably packaged junk food. I opted for the White Chocolate Strawberry and the Seaweed Rice Crackers.
To be fair, I was in a bad mood. An unseasonable cold snap of sub-zero temperatures in a tropical city combined with a perpetually grey sky hadn’t done this particular outing any favours. But still, I couldn’t help feeling an insidious tedium in such a place – a tedium brought about by the very idea of the tightly curated environment and what it has come to represent. The hotel and the “loft village” above it are similar in that regard. The former offers a curated vision of total good design, the latter, a curated simulacrum of city-ness. And to carry the curating metaphor one step further, the whole development is situated on a plinth-turned-shopping mall – neither the hotel nor the loft let the accidental haphazardness of the real city in.
This brings me back to my apartment and the Muji products I own. The toaster is a marvel, but then again, so is the bread that I buy at my local Italian shop. They go hand in hand. My coat rack is smothered by jackets that my wife and I have accumulated over time. My storage boxes are crammed with forgotten and one-day-to-be-rediscovered tchotchkes and souvenirs. My bookshelf, a record of things I’ve read or hope to read. The Muji Hotel offers neither the escapist fantasy at which a similarly priced luxury hotel can excel, nor the creature comforts and layered history of your own lived-in abode. Staying there is, instead, like being trapped inside a physical form of advertising copy.
Two new Muji Hotels are set to open next: the first in Beijing, in the lively hutong district Dashilar, and the other in the pre-eminent shopping district of Ginza in Tokyo. If Muji wants to improve on its model, it should consider letting a bit of the messiness of the real city in. Because, as I’ve come to realise, without the mess, Muji is a bore.
Words Brendan Cormier
Photographs courtesy of Muji
This article was originally published in Disegno #18. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.