About
An ordinary house, in an ordinary part of Osaka
Himejima Base is a small two-storey house in Nishiyodogawa, on the western edge of Osaka. It isn’t a hotel and it doesn’t try to be one. It’s a house — one that we’ve been repairing, painting and slowly improving with our own hands since before we ever had a guest.
When you book it, you get all of it. The living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom upstairs, the balcony where the washing machine lives, and the rooftop. Nothing is shared with anyone else. Up to four people, 43 square metres.
The neighbourhood around it is the point, as much as the house is. Himejima is where people actually live. There’s a supermarket everyone uses, a shrine at the end of a residential street, a river bank a minute from the door, and a station where only the local trains stop. Umeda — the middle of Osaka — is ten minutes away by train, so you can go and see everything. But you come back here, to a street where nobody is selling you anything.
What you can do here that you can’t do in a hotel
- Cook. There’s a full kitchen, and a supermarket three or four minutes away. Buying dinner at a Japanese supermarket is one of the more interesting things you can do in a day.
- Have the roof to yourself. Switch the string lights on, sit outside, let the evening run long. Nobody else is coming up.
- Walk the river before breakfast. A minute from the front door, the Yodo River embankment opens out into a long stretch of grass.
- Be somewhere quiet after a loud day. Osaka is a lot. Coming back to a house on a residential street is a different kind of evening from coming back to a lobby.
- Bring the dog. Pets are welcome here — see the pet page for what to sort out beforehand.
And what it isn’t — honestly
We’d rather you knew this before you book than after you arrive.
- It isn’t silent. The house is near a railway line and an expressway, and you will hear trains and traffic through the day and into the evening. We fitted a second polycarbonate window in the upstairs bedroom ourselves to soften it, and the trains stop between about 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. But if quiet is the single thing you care most about, this isn’t the right house. More about the noise →
- It isn’t large. 43 m², two floors, one bedroom. It suits four people who know each other well.
- It isn’t in the tourist centre. That’s deliberate — but it does mean a ten-minute train ride each way.
- There’s no car park. There is plenty of coin parking nearby, usually around ¥500 for 24 hours.
- Summer brings insects. Given where the house is, they sometimes get in. We do what we can.
- The whole house is non-smoking.
The practical shape of it
| Guests | Up to 4 |
| Size | 43 m² |
| Bedroom | 1 (two single beds) |
| Beds | 3 (plus a double sofa bed downstairs) |
| Bathroom | 1 |
| Type | Entire house, private |
| Station | Himejima (Hanshin Main Line), 3 min on foot |
| Check-in | Self check-in |
| Smoking | Non-smoking throughout |