Texas’ First Nap Bar Opens in Rice Village, Betting Houstonians Will Pay for Good Sleep

A brand new concept has hit Rice Village, urging the weary to sneak in some shut-eye during a busy day — and this one’s a dozy doozy.

At Houston’s new Nap Bar, you snooze, you win.

The new bar at 6111 Kirby Drive takes the concept of the power nap to the extreme. Open from 11 am to 4 pm, you can settle in for 20-minute, 26-minute, or even an hour-long naps in custom, soundproofed napping pods overseen by Comfort Concierges to ensure safety.

Texas’ first ever Nap Bar, a white-glove health and wellness concept, will have five beds, with organic New Living mattress in sizes from twin XL to full. There will be two sets of stackable beds, one in each unit, along with one full size bed in a freestanding suite.

The appeal doesn’t end at a horizontal surface where you can pay to snooze. If you’re a Snoozers Club member, there are many complimentary services included — and if you’re not, you can still purchase them a la carte.

Think pajamas, aromatherapy, lymphatic massages, multichannel brain wave therapy that dings you awake, hot showers, espressos and raw juices.

Nap Bar charges $25 for a 20-minute nap, and roughly $179 for the membership.

The Science of Sleep

The nap bar trend has taken off in New York, Europe and Japan. And Nap Bar founder Khaliah Guillory knew it was time to make sure Houstonians could escape the hustle and bustle and catch some extra Zzzz’s.

A former C-Level executive from Richmond, Texas, Guillory got all too used to napping in her car when she drove into Houston for business meetings. But catching up on sleep to recharge was a must, and besides, she’d always been one to catch a few winks.

“I’ve been an avid napper since kindergarten. People never had to coerce me or give me a reason why I needed to take a nap. It was, ‘Oh, it’s nap time.’ I grabbed my little mat and that was it,” Guillory laughs.

Exactly a year ago to the day during an hour-and-a-half-long break between meetings in the city, Guillory’s wife suggested she Google naps in Houston.

Guillory did. It yielded no results. There was no place in Houston or even Texas to nap mid-day. “At that moment, she looked at me and said ‘You need to create it,’ ” Guillory says.

The concept is to turn sustainable rest into sustainable production for health-conscious humans. “This Nap Bar is an innovative and progressive approach to ensure that we have enough rest to perform at an optimum level,” Guillory says.

The thought of a plush pillow might be the only draw you need. But Guillory’s quick to point out the scientific research backing napping.

NASA has conducted sleep studies on exhausted pilots and found that a simple 26-minute nap helped lead to a 34 percent increase in performance and 54 percent increase in alertness.

It’s not just about boosting performance at work. “We need enough rest so when it gets down to 7 pm we have energy to have dinner with our family and to help our kids out at school and to perform at optimal maximum power at the gym,” Guillory notes.

She’s not ready to lose any sleep.