You Can Go Home Again, but Why?

TOKYO

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Ayumi Nakanishi for The New York Times

Remote controls for light and music in the bathroom.

“THE journey itself is home,” wrote the peripatetic 17th-century Japanese poet Basho. And maybe it was, for him. But for a modern wandering soul, can a hotel room ever achieve the comforts of home? Entering one, the first thing I do, like most travelers, is get my bearings: figure out where everything is and how it all works, toy with the best configuration of lighting and temperature, arrange things just so in a quick simulacrum of home.

But there are forces working against this impromptu home-making, many arising from deficiencies of design. It takes only one scalding under a strange shower, or a few minutes trying to puzzle out the snooze functions (“dream time”?) on a complex alarm clock, to stir a longing for one’s real home.

Then there are the placards scattered about, shilling for the room’s merchandise, primly hectoring the guest not to waste towels, broadcasting ominous warnings. (One personal favorite: “Do not leave the bathroom door open while showering or you may trigger the hotel’s fire alarm.”) Finally, there is the loss of environmental control: no way to summon a favorite afternoon radio talk show, or make a good cup of coffee.

There is a place, however, where many of these failings have been conquered though intuitive technology and smart design, a place marked by such endemic comfort and ease that home itself begins to seem like a downgrade. It is the newest Peninsula hotel, a 24-story building opposite Hibiya Park in the Marunouchi district of Tokyo, with what may be the world’s most fully thought-through hotel rooms.

There is nothing new, of course, about a high-tech, upmarket Tokyo hotel that gently baffles and impresses its jet-lagged Western visitors, as the Park Hyatt did in Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.” Even midmarket hotels here commonly feature things like remote-controlled curtains, fax machines and flat-panel televisions. And many other details of Japanese life, too — like taxi doors that seem to open on their own, motion-triggered bathroom-soap dispensers and seats that automatically turn around at the end of a shuttle train’s run — are designed to function as smoothly as possible, with no awkward moments or wasted motions.

But the Peninsula, which has become a pilgrimage site of sorts for hoteliers since it opened in September, takes this approach to a new level. The visitor fresh off a discombobulatingly long flight and a two-hour, traffic-choked journey from Narita Airport is ushered into a quiet, softly lighted cocoon where every contingency seems to have been anticipated.

Need to call home to confirm you’ve arrived? The phone panel shows the time there. (It also advises on hometown weather, and notes holidays.) Feeling dried-out from the flight or the Tokyo winter? No need to waste half an hour with a shower; just adjust the humidity. Need to perk up for a meeting? Pop an espresso pod into the Lavazza machine behind a sleek cabinet door, press a button and you’ve got crema.

And the innovations go well beyond that. When the phone rings, the radio or television is automatically muted. When it rings at night, the bedside sconce glows just enough so you can answer it. The bathroom phone features a digital filter to screen out telltale echoes. When you push the “spa” button in the tub, the lights soften and the radio shifts to a station playing calming music.

To make Skype calls, no need to set up your laptop — just push the phone’s Skype button. If you want to continue a phone conversation in the hotel lobby, take the portable phone with you. And if you want to keep talking on the street, it shifts to a cellular network.

The myriad clever ideas on display were field-tested in advance by employees who spent a night in a model room in a “bunker” beneath the company’s offices on Repulse Bay in Hong Kong. “The detail was to the point where I opened the blinds to a huge wall mural of Hibiya Park,” said Malcolm Thompson, the Peninsula Tokyo’s general manager. (He previously managed the Park Hyatt, where he oversaw its star turn in Ms. Coppola’s film.)

The man behind most of this is Fraser Hickox, the longtime head of the company’s electronic services department, who oversaw more than 20 engineers for two years as they tinkered their way through various versions of the room. Although Mr. Hickox, an Australian based in Hong Kong, has a Ph.D. in radio physics, he likes to keep his rooms accessible for nonscientists. Unlike the users of automated homes, free to puzzle out complex systems, hotel guests may have the learning curve of just a single night’s stay. “The real secret to technology,” he said, “is that you shouldn’t have to think about it.”

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