Inside the Zurich ‘capsule’ hotel that has £41-a-night plywood boxes for rooms

Zurich is an expensive city, where plush hotels that normally charge an arm and a leg cost at least an additional limb. But who needs plush when you have no body parts to spare and, like me, you’re only passing through?

I opted for a budget ‘capsule’ hotel, a few steps away from the Swiss city’s glorious Grossmunster church and its famous Chagall windows.

The Green Marmot capsule hotel has won awards for its cosy cubby holes. Made from light birchwood, each capsule contains a fold-out wooden table, a circular mirror and a plug point. There’s also a duvet and sheets made of organic Egyptian cotton above a thick mattress. It’s a bed with a low roof. You can sit in the space, hunched over, but not stand. It’s not for the claustrophobic or the shy – your privacy is protected merely with an itsy-bitsy curtain, open at the top.

The capsules are stacked two high and fill one of several rooms. An architectural drawing framed on a wall shows one room to accommodate 36 people. The packaging of sardines springs to mind. But it only cost me £43.72 for a night. This comes down to £41 if you book far enough ahead.

The hotel’s website shows happy families sharing a number of capsules but that’s clearly impractical because, paying per head, it would be far cheaper – and more secure – for a family to stay in a standard twin hotel room.

There are some double bed spaces available, but the capsules best suit singles.

Toilets and showers are communal. This shared aspect of the hotel means, in reality, it’s a hostel but in most hostels you see your fellow travellers while they sleep and in-room facilities, such as plug points, also tend to be communal. In the Green Marmot capsule hotel you’re in your own burrow, like a marmot and only catch sight of others when they choose to show themselves, also like a marmot.

Although the hotel says it offers single-sex rooms, the room I slept in was mixed, with both men and women in the cubby holes. This wasn’t a problem for me but there were no locks or blocks: the skimpy curtain is the only guarantee of privacy, and anybody could pull it back should they be so minded, or as I did, they mistake the space for a luggage compartment.

I should have known this wasn’t where extra bags would be stored because I’d already placed my valuables in the hotel’s excellent lockers. I was travelling with a Tern folding bike and I was delighted to discover it fitted perfectly in the locker. However, I then had no other space for my other bags, so – after my aborted attempt to find a home for them – I hung them from two of the three wooden coat hooks in the capsule.

The lockers open and lock with the digital touch of a card and this worked flawlessly, including at 4:30am when I crept from the hotel for my early train. An expensive hotel room would have been a waste when I was spending such little time in bed and wouldn’t be around for breakfast. The Green Marmot capsule hotel has vending machines for snacks and hot drinks but there’s no other food, and no catering facilities for whipping up your own. Instead, there are cafes and restaurants on the hotel’s doorstep. Wi-Fi is strong and free and I’ve stayed in ultra-chic hotels where neither has been the case. Each individual capsule is air-conditioned – you can feel the cold air pumped through gaps – and there were none of the ripe smells common to communal living spaces.

What was the night like? Cramped, but nevertheless comfortable, and my fellow guests didn’t treat the ‘hotel’ like a backpacker’s hostel. They were quiet, respectful and I didn’t need the free earplugs the receptionist offered on arrival. Each capsule is insulated from the other with sound-proofing foam. I was snug and with power and Wi-Fi, perfectly content in my weeny space. I folded out the flatpack table, worked on my laptop, charged my electricals and caught up with home

The Green Marmot’s location, meanwhile – in the centre of the old town – is better than many of the city’s upscale hotels and it takes just seconds to reach the promenade of the Limmat river and its medieval buildings, or the riverside tram. Lake Zurich is a brisk walk away. Pioneered in Japan in the late 1970s, capsule hotels can now be found in many cities – and airports – around the world. I’ve slept in an airport one, much of which was posh plastic but still as cramped as this wooden city centre one.

Green Marmot capsule hotel opened in 2020 and bills itself as green because of its use of eco-materials and the urbanist repurposing of some previously run-down space – the building looked like an office in a previous life. It’s an option, then, for the eco-conscious as well as the budget-conscious.