Sweets Hotel Machida - The Love Hotel That Runs on Candy

Sweets Hotel Machida is exactly what it sounds like, and absolutely nothing like what you'd expect. Sitting in suburban Tokyo, this 19-room love hotel has committed so completely to its confectionery concept - chocolate baths, shell-shaped beds, a mermaid aquarium - that the result lands somewhere between a fever dream and a massively fun place to spend a night.

It is strange. It has an animatronic candy tree that moves in the dark. And it's worth knowing about.

Getting There

Machida sits in the southwestern fringe of Greater Tokyo, a commuter city that most tourists skip entirely. The hotel is hard to miss once you're close: the building is decorated like something out of a Grimm fairy tale, its facade dressed with whipped cream reliefs, oversized cookies, and candy-house detailing. The overall effect is aggressively cheerful in a way that feels slightly threatening after dark.

A Hotel With a Sweet Tooth

The building predates its current incarnation, but the sweets concept launched in November 2021.

Love hotels in Japan are a well-established institution - designed for privacy, charged by the hour or by the night, and equipped with everything you'd need to never leave the room. Sweets Hotel Machida leans into the format while adding a layer of theatrical decor that makes it memorable.

The check-in process is touchscreen-based; you won't interact with staff face to face. Food is left at your door. The elevator runs one-way to prevent guests from crossing paths in the corridor.

The Rooms

There are 19 rooms across three tiers: 11 Economy rooms, 2 Standard rooms, and 6 Deluxe rooms, all of them sweets-themed to some degree. Even the elevator doors are printed with a macaron pattern.

The corridors pipe in background music continuously - one recurring review complaint is that it's audible through the walls and that nobody, including staff, seems able to turn it off.

Economy and Standard rooms cover the basics: sweets-inspired interiors, smart TVs with Netflix access, microwaves, hair irons, and a generous pile of free amenities in the bathroom - cleansing oil, face masks, toner, cotton pads and more - that skew heavily toward a female audience. The hotel's marketing does the same.

The Deluxe rooms are where things get specific. Room 103 comes with a shell-shaped bed that curves around you like a giant clamshell, designed - again, per the hotel's own materials - to make you feel like a mermaid. The same room also has a chocolate bath.

Room 105 has a full karaoke setup.

Rooms 216 and 218 feature a mermaid aquarium - a floor-to-ceiling fish tank that the hotel bills, with a straight face, as having an "animal therapy effect."

The chocolate bath deserves its own sentence. You run the tub, dissolve in what the hotel provides, and the water turns a deep, unsettling brown. It looks considerably worse than it sounds. Whether it constitutes a spa experience or a test of nerve depends on your disposition, but it is one of the more unusual things you can do in a Tokyo hotel room.

Some Deluxe rooms also come with a jacuzzi, and room 220 has a dry sauna - described as producing "high-quality sweat," which is either inspired copywriting or a translation artifact, and either way is hard to argue with.