A hotel on a back street in Tokyo's Harajuku is unveiling fully rebuilt wedding spaces this month. The news surfaced first not on hotel booking sites but on wedding venue listings. It has 15 rooms, and hosts more than 700 weddings a year.
1.TRUNK(HOTEL) CAT STREET opened in May 2017 in Jingumae, Shibuya Ward, right beside Cat Street, the pedestrian lane linking Harajuku and Shibuya. This renewal covers every wedding space. The freestanding chapel in the rooftop garden on the top floor now carries a new name, the Chapel of Light and Forest (Hikari to Mori no Chapel).
2.The company behind it is not a hotel company. Its parent, TAKE and GIVE NEEDS (T&G), is a wedding venue operator that spread the house wedding across Japan, renting out an entire standalone building to one party. Founder Yoshitaka Nojiri runs the hotel subsidiary, TRUNK, himself as its president. Its directly operated venues held 9,853 weddings in the year from April 2024.
3.The building splits into two wings, one for the hotel and one for weddings. Divide the 5,106 ㎡ of total floor area by 15 rooms and each room carries 340 ㎡, while the same division at a downtown business hotel usually lands somewhere in the 20s of square meters. Design supervision was by MOUNT FUJI ARCHITECTS STUDIO, the shop by TORAFU ARCHITECTS.
4.The rooms are 11 standards and 4 suites. Standards run 20 to 30 ㎡, and even counting all 11 at 30 ㎡ and adding the suites, the rooms total just 652 ㎡. That is under 13% of the floor area. The rest is shared by the lobby lounge and bar, two restaurants, a shop, four banquet rooms and a chapel.
5.The four suites were not built just for sleeping. The Terrace Suite has 140 ㎡ indoors and a 70 ㎡ terrace, and the official plan puts a 16-seat long table in the middle of the living room. The terrace has a propane grill and a sink, and the Dining Suite also gets an island kitchen with IH burners and a griddle. What a room starting at 570,000 yen a night sells, with the table at its center, is the gathering.
6.The lobby has a low threshold. TRUNK(BAR) glows in white neon over a wall of reclaimed timber set on end, and beside the leather sofas runs a long communal table lined with desk lamps. Step outside and there is a yard of benches and steel chairs around a single tree, with strings of bulbs overhead at night. Guest reviews often complain that on weekends wedding guests fill the lobby and bar. Fifteen rooms could never fill this much space, so the people who fill it were meant to come from outside from the start.
7.What about the rooms on their own? In T&G's results for April to December 2025, CAT STREET posted an average daily rate of 97,765 yen at 92.1% occupancy, a RevPAR of about 90,000 yen. TRUNK(HOTEL) YOYOGI PARK, the second hotel, opened in Tomigaya in September 2023 with 25 rooms, and its rate topped 100,000 yen over the same period.
8.T&G reports TRUNK revenue as its own line in its results. For the year from April 2024 it came to 6.272 billion yen. Back-calculating what the two hotels' 40 rooms earned over the same period, from the disclosed occupancy and room rate, gives roughly 1.13 billion yen. Rooms account for about 18%.
9.Most of the rest comes from weddings. The hotel lists “more than 700 couples a year” on wedding venue sites, and in costs reported by couples who married there, the 5 to 6 million yen range is the most common. At 5 million yen a couple that is 3.5 billion yen, more than half of TRUNK's revenue. Segment revenue is not disclosed, so this is an estimate, but even at T&G's company-wide average of 4.16 million yen it comes to 2.9 billion yen.
10.A Japanese city hotel's revenue usually splits 30% each for rooms, food and beverage, and banquets, with 10% other. Filling the banquet halls took hundreds of rooms, and weddings were a thick strand of that banquet revenue. TRUNK ran the order in reverse. It built the wedding wing and set 15 rooms beside it, so the reputation a grand hotel earned with hundreds of rooms and a rating is made here by 15 rooms instead.
11.The guests make that reputation. 93.8% of guests at the two hotels come from overseas, and a 2023 report put 80% of CAT STREET bookings through its own channels. The OTA commission saved by selling direct runs to tens of millions of yen a year for 15 rooms. A wedding is 5 million yen per couple. If the image of a hotel full of foreign travelers brings in just twelve more wedding bookings, it beats those savings.
12.The buyers of weddings have changed too. At T&G's directly operated venues, the number of weddings fell 4.4% in the year to March 2025 while the average price rose 2.4%. Fewer couples hold a ceremony, and those who do spend more. Why do they pick this hotel? One Japanese outlet described the couples filling its bookings as wanting “a wedding true to who we are now.” A lobby where people come and go even on weekdays shows those couples a scene a wedding-only building does not have.
13.The operating choices point the same way. The word it has used since opening is Socializing, and a sign at the front desk says 5 million yen of sales goes to nonprofit organizations every year. It opened a market that sells flowers once thrown away after weddings as fresh bouquets, and from January to August this year the official site listed 10 lobby pop-ups and solo shows alone. What hangs in the lobby changes every month, which gives neighbors a reason to come back.
14.TRUNK is not the first hotel to open its lobby as a neighborhood living room. The approach spread after Ace Hotel filled its New York lobby with laptop users in 2009, and most lifestyle hotels that followed made their money at the bar and restaurant. TRUNK attached four banquet rooms and a chapel behind that lobby, moving the wedding business Japanese city hotels had run for decades into a 15-room building.
15.From the next hotel on, the math changes. TRUNK(HOTEL) SAPPORO, whose opening date was announced on August 28, opens on September 17, 2027 with 107 rooms on floors 10 to 18 of a redevelopment building by Daibiru in Sapporo's Odori district. A chapel and banquet rooms, the brand's first spa, TRUNK(BATH HOUSE), and Sushi Saito come with it. The contract structure for Sapporo has not been disclosed. What the parent has put forward as its new opening model is a management contract, in which the owner pays for construction and TRUNK takes a set percentage of sales as a fee.
16.At 107 rooms, the rooms take the lead role. Even at 80% occupancy and a 70,000 yen room rate, room revenue comes close to 2.2 billion yen a year. The parent puts the combined business of Sapporo and the spring 2028 openings in Tokyo's Dogenzaka and in Kobe at 14 billion yen, double the whole hotel business today. Around the same time it brought in Toni Hinterstoisser, formerly vice president for Asia at citizenM, as president of its international arm. With 15 rooms, weddings paid for the building. In a 107-room hotel, the side that has to pay now is the rooms.
A Tokyo hotel that put 15 rooms into 5,106 ㎡ of floor area is unveiling fully rebuilt wedding spaces this month. Back-calculated from the parent's disclosures, rooms earn about 18% of TRUNK's revenue, and most of the rest comes from more than 700 weddings a year and food and drink in the lobby. Sell few rooms, at high prices, to foreign guests, build a name, and collect on that name through weddings. In Korea, this setup runs into trouble at registration. Under the Tourism Promotion Act the small hotel category starts at 20 rooms, so a 15-room boutique has a narrow path to registering as a hotel business and usually goes the route of general lodging under the Public Health Control Act. Under the Building Act a wedding hall counts as an assembly hall within cultural and assembly facilities, so the moment one goes into the building, it splits into two uses. The Parking Lot Act's enforcement decree alone asks for one space per 200 ㎡ of floor area for lodging and one per 150 ㎡ for assembly halls, and local ordinances can set the bar higher.