Designboom_ Photographer François Prost unveils Love Hotel, a photo series capturing the facades of Japan‘s love hotels during a 2023 road trip from Tokyo to Shikoku Island. The collection focuses on roadside architecture, showcasing faded signage and colorful facades that reflect a specific aspect of Japanese popular culture. This visual documentation shifts away from conventional depictions of Japan, instead painting a vernacular portrait of the area, highlighting the, often overlooked, design elements of these unusual establishments.
The series explores the juxtaposition between Japan’s densely urbanized megacities and its orderly agricultural countryside through the prism of love hotel exteriors. These hotels, rooted in Japanese popular culture, are designed to offer couples a private space away from the limited privacy of small family homes. Here, the photographer links distinctive architectural typologies with a cultural phenomenon reflecting on intimacy.
The Love Hotel series, launched on Kickstarter, will be published as a 230-page book, consistent in format with Prost’s previous photographic studies of vernacular architecture, including ‘After Party’ (France, 2011/23), ‘Gentlemen’s Club’ (USA, 2019), ‘Discoteca’ (Spain, 2020), and ‘Club Ivoire’ (Ivory Coast, 2023).
