Hoshikuzu

Getting to the bus stop and 7-11 takes about two minutes, and the port is roughly five minutes away on foot. The famous I heart Yu onsen, restaurants and coffee shops are close by too. The house is spacious, beautiful and impeccably clean. Cleaning ladies came each morning, cleaned the whole place and made our beds. The owner and staff don’t speak English, but they were very accommodating. Since they don’t live there, the house felt like it was ours, even with other guests around. The tradeoff was that checking in took some effort because we had to call the owner on our phones. We were sad to leave and would definitely recommend it. One thing to know: our room was in the attic, while the toilets are downstairs and the stairs are very steep, as we noticed in all Japanese homes. If stairs are an accessibility issue, ask for one of the two ground-floor rooms.

The location near the ferry is okay, and the guest house has a cute, traditional look, but I found the stay very disappointing after reading all those great reviews. We booked two rooms and were assigned one upstairs and one downstairs. It would have suited us, and the couple on their own, better to put us in the two lower rooms. It felt poorly thought out. The shared bathroom arrangement wasn’t clear on the website. At ¥10 000 per room per night in a guest house, I wouldn’t expect to share the toilets or bathroom. The host couldn’t speak English or operate the Visa machine, and didn’t show us around properly. The kitchen was very dirty: there was a dead cockroach in a cupboard, black dirt in the cutlery drawer, no condiments, and not even a saucepan for soup.

The place is a refurbished traditional house with all the amenities, and Japanese breakfast was included. Staff were very friendly, too. It’s conveniently close to Naoshima's main port. A great place to stay!

The whole house was clean and cosy, and the beds were comfortable with heated blankets. A lovely traditional place to stay on Naoshima. Highly recommend it.