Limited Edition: A Tokyo Hotel for the FOMO Set

After staying at The Tokyo Toranamon Edition, economics reporter Felix Salmon has thoughts about the current state of hotel lobbies — their design, their appeal, their seen and unseenvelvet ropes.

TOKYO — If you’ve stayed in a newish luxury hotel in a dense urban center of late, you’ve probably encountered the most profound change in hotel design of this century. Rather than a hotel being a building, it’s now a subset of floors in a bland mixed-use tower, especially if you’re traveling in Asia. That idea is now so common, so well-worn, that it has created its own conundrum: How is a hotelier to make such a property feel distinct, special, unique? 

After all, architecture has always been a key driver of the hotel experience. Great and memorable hotels have historically inhabited great and memorable buildings — Raffles at The Old War Office in London, the Adlon Kempinski in Berlin, the Peninsula in Hong Kong, and so on. Airport hotels, by contrast, are no one’s idea of a desirable destination — unless the airport hotel in question is the TWA Hotel at New York’s JFK, built around an Eero Saarinen masterpiece.

Grand hotels don’t need to be old. The recently-reopened Four Seasons New York, designed by I.M. Pei, greets visitors with a theatrical sequence of awe-inspiring grand limestone spaces. Visitors to Royal Mansour in Marrakech, built in 2010 and arguably the most beautiful hotel in the world, invariably find themselves walking around its lavish gardens in slack-jawed wonder. Part of the attraction of these spaces is that they’re open to the public: Many times more people have experienced the hotel than have stayed at it, and over time the building, inside and out, becomes part of the public consciousness. (I’ll meet you at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis in midtown Manhattan.)

Hotels occupying a part of a mixed-use tower, by contrast, generally have many fewer degrees of freedom with which to express their identity. The all-important experience of entering these hotels, for instance, the theater of the lobby reveal, has become a series of variations on a well-defined theme, one which was never particularly delightful to begin with. When you walk in off the street there’s basically nothing there — just a person whose only seeming job is to usher you into an elevator that takes you up to a sky lobby on the 28th or 45th or 71st floor. There, you’ll probably find impressive views, a nice bar, and an entirely separate elevator bank serving the floors with the guest rooms.

This kind of hotel design is first and foremost an economic phenomenon. It frees up valuable street-level square footage for higher-value purposes, and it allows a single elevator bank to be used two or three times over. The guest-room elevators, for instance, might sit directly above those of the offices below and below those of the residences above. Plus, by placing the hotel high in the sky, the design also enables guest rooms to boast those enviable views.

This, then, was the task facing Ian Schrager and the Edition team when they opened The Tokyo Toranamon Edition in 2020, their first Japan outpost on floors 31 through 36 of a clean and unexceptional office tower abutting the Toranomon district of Tokyo. (The Tokyo Edition Ginza opened in 2024.) The location is good; the views of the Tokyo Tower — the most iconic building in the city — are unbeatable. Thanks to the hotel’s location and elevation, all of the guest rooms enjoy fantastic views over some of the most interesting new architecture in Tokyo. And thanks to the design of the tower the hotel inhabits, some of the rooms even have outdoor space — generously-proportioned balconies from which to drink in one of the world’s great cities.

All of the rooms, with or without balconies, deliver on the main thing that distinguishes high-end hotels from the cheaper competition: They’re big. In a city like Tokyo where square footage comes at a premium, there’s no greater luxury than empty space — space, at the very least, to open a couple of suitcases. The rooms are Western — feel free to walk on the carpet in your street shoes — while the design by Kengo Kuma leans heavily on beiges and soft woods. I might cavil with the wiggly design of the blackout drapes, which don’t entirely blockade the morning sun, but there’s no doubt that this is a high-quality, high-end hotel, with generous proportions, friendly, attentive staff, and a full list of amenities. For travelers loyal to the Marriott ecosystem and those Bonvoy points, this is an easy sell.

But how to create a vibe, a way to imbue this particular place with a unique personality that sets it apart from all the other hotels in towers across Tokyo and the world? Can this hotel rise to the level of being a place that causes travelers to become loyal to the Marriott ecosystem — the kind of brass-ring grail hotel that they aspire to staying at?

The answer is yes — for a narrowly focused and highly desirable group of guests. And it’s built on a logic that befits the founder of Studio 54. Rather than try to go big and bold within the confines of architecture that doesn’t easily lend itself to such grandeur, Schrager has gone understated, and has, with serene self-confidence, trusted his patrons to turn the hotel into a destination unto itself. After all, that’s what makes for a successful nightclub or VIP room. People want to go to such hotspots not for their amenities, but just because other people — the people you want to be like — want to go there. Creating such a place is alchemy, but it’s a predictable enough alchemy that Marriott can rationally expect a handsome return on the millions it’s investing in the Edition brand.

This solution makes perfect sense. After all, it’s pretty much impossible to carve unique and breathtaking public and private spaces out of a limited tranche of floors in a mixed-use International Style tower. And the controlled serendipitous chaos of a bustling lobby is much harder to curate when the lobby is gatekept and 31 stories up in the air.

The unavoidable fact is that sky lobbies, by their nature, are much less of a public space than are street-level lobbies. They generally don’t feel like public spaces — and as a result they don’t play the role that grand-hotel lobbies have historically played in big cities.

A hotel lobby is — or was, until very recently — somewhere that can be ducked into, at least if you are able to carry yourself with a certain degree of innate privilege. It’s a natural neutral meeting place, a quiet spot to find a comfortable chair and while away some time, and — of course — it’s a fantastic location for people-watching.

Sky lobbies, by contrast, are literally and psychically more remote from the city in which they’re located. They’re not part of the urban fabric so much as they’re a way to get away from it, hidden behind layers of sentinels. I defy you, for instance, to try to rest for a while in the lobby of the Aman hotel in New York if you’re not a guest and can’t concoct a credible connection to one.

For some hotel denizens — billionaires, celebrities — this extra level of privacy and exclusiveness is a feature rather than a bug. Once they’ve made it past the lobby greeter, they’re in a safe zone, and they can feel at ease. For anybody who on some level is scared of the unpredictability of the street, a sky lobby is a much safer space than, say, the lobby of the Ritz. There will even probably be a direct connection to a secure basement-level parking facility, obviating the need to interact with anybody at street level at all.

Even the security-conscious, however, will rarely be thrilled by the airless sterility that tends to accompany these liminal zones of spa treatments and Luxury Beige. Most travelers, even the well known, still want to feel as though they’re staying in a place.

The medium-sized sky lobby of Toranomon Edition, dominated by pale softwoods with a few splashes of color, does have a certain modicum of personality. For one thing, it has an unusually large quantity of shrubbery, behind which the privacy-conscious can cloister. It also abuts a generously-proportioned outdoor terrace, for breezy informal F&B during the more temperate months. But it doesn’t have enough space for, say, a full-scale luxury breakfast buffet. (The breakfast menu is very good, but the buffet component is crowded awkwardly onto part of the lobby bar.)

Nor did the team compensate for the lack of a street-level lobby by going to town on the entrance vestibule, as other similarly-situated hotels have done. Often, one encounters an ostentatious driveway, a double-or triple-height welcome lobby, with everything seeming as big as possible even though there’s basically nothing there except for some elevator doors. (Exhibit A: Signiel Seoul.) The Edition, by contrast, has taken the exact opposite tack, making the front door so small as to barely be noticeable. IYKYK.

It’s not that the Toranomon Edition has nothing in the way of memorable features. Most notably, it has something called Gold Bar, a large space tucked next to the main entrance that occupies a prime street-level corner unit of the hotel building — with black curtains draped in front of all the floor-to-ceiling windows, to make it as featureless as possible from the outside. As you might expect, the hard-to-find entrance is understated and manned by folks who want to know whether you have a reservation; inside, the high ceilings and raised booths around the circumference ensure that every table has a good view of every other table.

This is one of the most theatrical hotel bars you’ll ever encounter — not a place to belly up and order a martini after a long day (that would be the lobby bar, 31 stories above you) but rather a place to come at 11 p.m. with half a dozen of the kind of dressed-to-the-nines friends who get a kick out of ordering rococo cocktails hidden on the menu in ultraviolet ink that is visible only with the aid of the provided blacklight flashlight. Most of its patrons will neither know nor care that Gold Bar is connected to a hotel at all.

As for the more quotidian hotel functions, the Toranomon Edition does the job. There’s a small gym, but it’s windowless and feels more dutiful than a point of pride. Similarly, it’s not obvious who wants to lounge by a pool with no views that’s buried inside an office tower. The front-desk staff are friendly and helpful — they got me a reservation at a truly spectacular restaurant called Julia — but this is a big hotel, with more than 200 guest rooms, and you sometimes get the feeling that you’re an entry in a Marriott CRM system at least as much as you’re a person with individual needs and preferences. There are many places in Tokyo that you might choose to go to experience the legendary Japanese hospitality known as omotenashi; this isn’t one of them.

Instead, the Edition asserts its personality in other ways. It can assault the senses, not only with its music, which tends to be quite loud, but also with “the exclusive Black Tea scent made by Le Labo, the global staple scent in all EDITION Hotels,” which is pumped into guest corridors and elevators. And of course if you’re sensitive to all-caps shouting then you won’t be able to escape the EDITION branding, much as you might like to. (No, it doesn’t stand for anything, someone just decided it always needs to be in upper case.)

The logic here is undeniable, even compelling, in its own way. In a world of ever-proliferating hotel brands, it’s good for a hotel to appeal to one kind of person and not to another. If I was a jet-setting, music-industry 27-year-old on an expense account, I would love this place, and I would undoubtedly know who the pop star was who entered my elevator accompanied by a very large bodyguard. God knows there’s no shortage of high-end hotels catering to bankers and lawyers and captains of industry; it’s good to find one that has the assurance to tack in a different direction.

The Toranomon Edition isn’t revolutionary: It hasn’t solved the narrow problem of how to turn a sky lobby into a public place. No one is going to just wander in here and hang out. It has, however, solved the bigger problem of how to turn a sky lobby into a known destination and a place where people want to be: to mingle between its ferns is to be surrounded by rich young creative types. When I told folks in Tokyo where I was staying, they all knew where I was talking about, and generally mentioned that they’d been there for some kind of special occasion. That’s no mean achievement — and it’s clearly something a lot of guests want to be a part of.

Expensive hotels, after all, have always been intimidating — the only real question is who feels at home, and who feels intimidated. Being strategic about picking the in-group and the out-group is something that Schrager has done for his entire career. Now, he’s done it in Tokyo.