Product Description

"Wallpaper City Guides" present a tightly edited, discreetly packaged list of the best a location has to offer the design conscious traveller. Here is a precise, informative, insider's checklist of all you need to know about the world's most intoxicating cities. Whether you are staying for 48 hours or five days, visiting for business or a vacation, we've done the hard work for you, from finding the best restaurants, bars and hotels (including which rooms to request) to the most extraordinary stores and sites, and the most enticing architecture and design. "Wallpaper City Guides" enable you to come away from your trip, however brief, with a real taste of the city's landscape and the satisfaction you've seen all that you should. In short, these guides act as a passport to the best the world has to offer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #378541 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780714848396
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Wallpaper* City Guides are compiled by the magazine's travel experts, both by in-house editors, and correspondents who actually live in the highlighted cities, providing up-to-the-minute information. They are published on the occasion of the magazine's 10th anniversary and highlight its mission to present the best in new design and sophisticated urban travel.

Customer Reviews

poorly edited, poorly fact-checked, not that cool
This slim guide seems like it would be a lot of fun to follow along with, but it's quite another matter to actually take it to Tokyo (as I did.) It's a Phaidon/Wallpaper production, so you know to expect slick prose and a somewhat slavish in/cool attitude -- that's fine. Tokyo is a materialistic city, after all, fascinated by cool, and where fashion is a popular sport.

But unfortunately, the guide does not amount to much more than its well-produced photographs; directions (in a city where directions are hard to come by) are fantastically poor (Naka-Meguro station or Meguro?), advice (when precise enough to follow) is of dubious value (e.g., unless your editor comps you cab rides, staying at the Claska hotel is a bad idea for exploring the city), assumes you can spend +$100/day on food and drink alone, and recommendations seem haphazard (e.g., the guide is right that Ebisu is an interesting visit, but the explicit suggestions it makes are puzzling.)

The "cheaper" recommendations -- i.e., not the advice to blow thousands on hotels and high-end shops and meals -- are the most problematic; poorly researched, you might blow 3000 Yen ($30) on a cover charge to discover a cold and uninviting space such as the X+Y. It is, in other words, a guide that "feels" much more accurate than it actually is.

For the visitor, Tokyo is a shopper's city where many streets look like a Blade Runner version of Fifth Avenue. The Wallpaper guide, one might hope, would give you a different side, something a little cooler, a little more offbeat. But once you subtract out the graphic design and the "insider's" tone, you are left with a few bits and pieces that don't add up to much more than you might find out browsing websites Metropolis or Bento.

Helpfull
indeed it is a helpful guide.. easy to use and very concrete and points out the interesting places to visit in japan..