While I was looking for a place to stay in Nagasaki, I came across this listing on Airbnb and fell in love pretty much immediately. It’s a traditional Japanese house in a quiet neighbourhood and it costs what I was budgeted per night for a hotel.

So sorry, this is not really a review, it’s just an excuse for me to show off the photos of the house. Because the house is gorgeous!!

This traditional house was located in a quiet neighbourhood about ten minutes away from the tram. Honestly, taking the tram was a bad idea – Google maps did not tell me that I would need to bring my luggage up a flight of steps and if I had known, I would have just taken a taxi to the nearest street and walked up.

But that’s not the fault of the house because look at it!

When the gate opened, the first thing I saw was the stone garden with butterflies flying about (admittedly, not the easiest to drag luggage across but that’s really a problem only for check-in and check-out).

The house itself was huge. There are two tatami rooms – one with a tokoma and a table that I used as a living room, and one with cupboards with all the futons necessary. There’s also a kitchen with a fridge, stove, kettle, and even a microwave oven, and of course, the bathroom. What I thought was interesting about the house is that the walkway goes all around – basically the two main rooms are back to back and there’s a corridor going around them with the kitchen and bathroom at two of the sides. It means you can quite literally keep walking in… well not circles but a rectangle.

Quite honestly, I found it hard to leave this place. Though it’s quite far from the city center (it’s about 20 minutes away from the house to Nagasaki station via tram), I found it a really nice place to relax in.