Between the blue curtains of SUPERSENSE on Praterstrasse in Vienna, I caught a glimpse of an “Itameshi-ya,” an Italian restaurant inspired by Japan. Sitting in front of it was a Burmester audio system. Further inside stood a record-cutting machine and tools for letterpress printing, while upstairs were a research lab for the development of Polaroid cameras and rooms where artists could stay.

Japanese “Young Magazine,” Itoya stationery, city pop vinyl records. Everywhere in the building, Showa-era Japan was packed into the space. Seeing things so familiar to me in Vienna could not be explained simply by nostalgia. The time I had lived through was somehow connected, in an unfamiliar city, to someone else’s highly refined everyday life. Amid that strange overlap, my sense of time and place gradually began to waver.

When, exactly, am I, and where?

Its founder, Florian “Doc” Kaps, is known as the man who helped save Polaroid film production. When Polaroid announced in 2008 that it would discontinue instant film production, he and his colleagues launched what later became known as the “Impossible Project,” rescuing the last remaining factory in the Netherlands, a story that was eventually made into a film. He had originally studied biology and researched spiders. When I asked why he had moved into the world of photography, he answered with almost disarming simplicity: “Because I couldn’t find a job as a spider expert.”

Through his work with instant photography, he noticed that the young people who came to buy film also loved coffee, records, and notebooks. In 2014, he founded SUPERSENSE to bring all those interests together in one place. For listening, there are records; for seeing, photography; for tasting, food. He even created a laboratory for experiments with scents, while printed matter allows visitors to experience texture with their own hands. There is something to try for each of the five senses.

And while old wooden type is still in use, laser cutters are at work nearby, and records come with cards that allow even people without a record player to listen to the music. By combining a little digital technology with the analog world, they create things that can be held in your hands. Even someone who loves records may never have seen the moment when sound is physically carved into a disc. Here, visitors can watch the process of cutting grooves into a lacquer disc and take part in it themselves. The music created in this way can then be listened to in the same building.

That practice eventually expanded into accommodation. Even after sharing dinner with people who had gathered from around the world, everyone would return to their own hotels at night. He did not want the energy that had emerged there to simply disappear. So why not create a place where they could stay together? That realization became the starting point.

There are two apartments for guests. The walls are covered with works left behind by artists who have stayed here, and one of the rooms even has a pinball machine that can take Polaroid photographs. In a small studio, performances are recorded while the sound is simultaneously cut onto vinyl. Guests live together for several days, experimenting and creating a record. The most meaningful “souvenir” they take home is a single record engraved with the time they spent in that place.

He defines luxury as “time, slowing down, real value, and trust.” Feeling protected, sleeping well, and knowing that someone cares about your pain. How can you create the sense of security you feel when you are invited into a friend’s home? The apartments, as well as the upstairs space for the body and mind that his wife creates with therapists, are all connected to that question.

When he started the business, he invested his savings and also received public funding. “We have an economic crisis at the end of every month,” he says, but if you want to build something that lasts for generations, it has to be a profitable business. That is his philosophy. Yet financial constraints are not necessarily a bad thing. They can help you determine what is truly worth spending money on and let go of what is unnecessary. And relationships with guests can only be cultivated over many years. No amount of money can shorten that time.

Even after a stay comes to an end, the relationships that began there continue.

The value of post-luxury is never “instant”; it resides in relationships and time.