Welcome to the house of love

From cruise ships to UFOs and giant whales, half the sex in Japan may happen in the architecturally astonishing world of its thousands of love hotels

- Oliver Wainwright

Do whales make you horny? How about UFOs? Maybe you've always dreamed of having a tryst in a fairytale castle, or making love inside a gigantic biscuit tin? Whatever your weird fantasy may be, it can probably be catered for on a roadside somewhere in Japan, if a new book on the curious phenomenon of love hotels is anything to go by.

French photographer François Prost has been on a 3,000km pilgrimage of passion, driving from Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo, to the island of Shikoku in the south, to document Japan's unique architecture of furtive liaisons. What he found spans from manga-embellished motels and Christmas-themed love nests to pastel-hued stage sets worthy of Wes Anderson. And some things stranger than your most eccentric kinks could dream of.

"I find love hotels culturally fascinating," says Prost, whose previous projects have included photographing the facades of strip clubs in the US and nightclubs in Ivory Coast. “Japan is generally a fairly conservative society, but these are places of escapism, fantasy and almost childlike wonder. And you find them everywhere.”

Estimates vary, but some put the number of love hotels - or rabu hoteru - in the country as high as 37,000. They pop up in city centres and rural villages, at busy highway junctions and secluded among fields in the middle of nowhere. As Prost's photographs show vividly, they come in all shapes, sizes and stylistic genres.

Some look like alpine chalets, others like tiki huts, while plenty are modelled on cruise ships, promising to take you on a voyage to love paradise. Whether French chateaux get your juices flowing or you have a penchant for Arabian onion domes, there's a place waiting for you to be greeted by an anonymous receptionist, pay for a kyukei, or “rest”, and live out your carnal dreams.