Zentis Osaka

Zentis Osaka

In Dojimahama, on the Kita-ku bank where Osaka's business district gives way to the bars and hostess clubs of Kitashinchi, a sixteen-storey tower opened in July 2020 as the debut property of a new brand from Palace Hotel Co., Ltd., the Tokyo company behind the Forbes Five-Star-rated Palace Hotel Tokyo. The building, a new construction by Toshiken architecture office and Kajima Design, was handed over for its interiors to Tara Bernerd, the London-based designer and former protégé of Philippe Starck, making her first project in Japan. Two hundred and twelve rooms and suites are arranged across the tower, from twenty-five-square-metre Studios to fifty-seven-square-metre Suites on the top floors, each guaranteed a minimum width of four metres, a small architectural negotiation that gives even the smallest room space to breathe. It stands a fifteen-minute walk from Osaka Station. Daisuke Yoshihara, president of Palace Hotel Co., Ltd., has described the brand's ambition as pairing hotel-grade design with the practicalities independent travellers actually want, and Zentis Osaka, the first Design Hotels member property in the city, is the test case. Bernerd's interiors lean on exposed brick and timber, a materials response to the city's industrial heritage, set against bedside tables thrown in the kilns of Shigaraki in Shiga prefecture and wallpaper patterned on shodo calligraphy. Commissioned artwork by the Osaka-based artist Masami Ehara runs through the public spaces, and a limestone staircase climbs from the ground-floor atrium past a courtyard planted thick enough to blur the city outside. On the second floor, UPSTAIRZ, a 250-square-metre, 116-seat all-day restaurant with an open kitchen, a lounge and a covered terrace, is run by Shinya Otsuchihashi, the Michelin-starred chef behind Craftale in Nakameguro, Tokyo, who built a Japanese-French menu around seasonal, local ingredients; the bar, under head bartender Norihiko Furuse, draws its own crowd independent of the hotel. Room 001, once conceived as a self-service laundry, has been reworked into a lounge guests use to kill time before heading out, and a 24-hour fitness centre with Life Fitness equipment shares the second floor with the restaurant. What Zentis Osaka offers is closer to a well-run apartment building than a hotel in the grand sense, industrial materials kept honest instead of softened, service pointed at efficiency, not ceremony, and a location that puts Nakanoshima's turn-of-the-century institutions, the old Bank of Japan Osaka branch, the 1918 Central Public Hall, the Sumitomo-funded library of 1904, a short walk across the river. It draws designers, consultants and other people who work while they travel, visible in the lobby lounge on laptops between meetings, alongside couples who have chosen it for Otsuchihashi's cooking as much as for the beds. There is little pretense of grandeur here; the ambition is precision, in room layout, in the kitchen, in a fireplace that runs double-sided between lobby and terrace. You should not come to Zentis Osaka for period atmosphere, or for the sprawling spa-and-garden resort experience Kyoto or Hakone specialise in; this is a business-district tower with 212 rooms, and the exterior, glass and steel above a busy road, does none of the work that Bernerd's interiors do once you are through the door. You should come if you want a base with a serious kitchen attached, a short walk from both Umeda's department stores and Nakanoshima's museums, and rooms built with enough width and light that a few nights start to feel less like a hotel stay and more like borrowed lodging. The short version: A 212-room tower in Dojimahama, Osaka, opened 2020 by Palace Hotel Co., interiors by Tara Bernerd, Michelin-pedigree cooking at UPSTAIRZ, built for travellers who work as much as they wander.