Hakone Hills

The kitchen is modern, with an IH stove, refrigerator, small oven and microwave, and there are enough kitchen utensils, though they’re poorly maintained. The house itself is spacious, but parts can’t be used: for example, the second-floor terrace, and a large upstairs room is locked and marked staff only. I’ve never come across that while travelling in Japan. The setting is nice, and the booking.com photos make the place look amazing, but seeing it in person was a big disappointment. It’s an old, sparsely decorated Japanese country house. You can’t get from the parking space straight into the house. It sits about two floors below the road, so all your luggage has to be carried down the stairs. The stair lights are dim, some don’t work, and some only come on when you get close. The front courtyard is cluttered, and the living room has old cabinets and cupboards scattered around, all locked and neither useful nor decorative. Its ceiling is uneven, bare concrete painted white. The corner window that seems to promise the lovely view was the biggest letdown. A pipeline blocks it, and the scaffolding beneath makes it look like the place is under construction. The bathroom is astonishingly old, with a stainless steel tub that looks like a kitchen sink, and bad smells coming from it all day. The Japanese style toilet worked only about half the time during my stay. The bedroom wasn’t very comfortable either. The air conditioner was noisy and stopped for ten minutes every few hours. For almost 50,000 yen a night, the house was very expensive and didn’t match the photos.