My favorite feature of Japan's now-defunct Nakagin Capsule Tower apartments is the neat fold-down desk you see above. The parallelogram cross-section cleverly positions the desk at sitting height, yet still leaves a little bit of counter space when it's flipped up into the wall.
The Nakagin Capsule Tower may be dead and its cool parallelogram desk forgotten, but its space-saving spirit lives on not only in the capsule hotels of Japan, but in airports in the UK and soon, New York City's Times Square.
Let's back up a second. Years ago Simon Woodroffe, an ex-stage-designer turned business mogul, was on an airplane when, in his own words: "I was lucky enough to get an upgrade to the sleeper bed in British Airways first class. I went to sleep with the conundrum of how to make a Japanese capsule hotel acceptable in the west and woke up realising the solution was around me: all I needed to do was find the designer of the BA first class cabin and ask them to help me design a hotel."
By 2003 Woodroffe had tapped Studio Conran to design his new Yotel capsule hotels, and their Red-Dot-Award-winning design subsequently launched in 2007.
