Ice Hotels

The material comes out of the Torne River. Blocks are cut in spring, held in cold storage through the summer, and used the following winter to build walls, vaults and furniture. Snow is mixed with air and sprayed over steel forms to make the structural arches, and once it has set the forms are removed. Nothing is permanent, and nothing is meant to be.

Each winter a new set of artists is selected to design the individual art suites, so the interior changes completely from one year to the next. Sleeping rooms are held below freezing, and guests use insulated bags on beds of ice with reindeer hides over them. Heated buildings alongside hold the bathrooms, the sauna, the restaurant and the lockers, because the ice building cannot hold any of that. There is also a year-round wing on the site, cooled by solar power through the summer, which lets the operation keep working when the seasonal building has melted. That combination of a permanent hall and a temporary one is unusual among the hotels in this section.

Icehotel is the oldest hotel in this section and the model the others follow. It established the pattern of the annual rebuild, the artist-designed suite and the warm service building beside the cold one. The hotels at Alta, Rovaniemi and Kittilä all work within that pattern, and the differences between them are mostly differences of climate, scale and how long the season lasts.

The construction method is the one used in Lapland, adapted to a milder and wetter climate. Snow is packed over curved forms to make vaults, ice blocks are set into the walls where light is wanted, and the whole plan is drawn again from scratch each year. Because the site is further south than the Swedish and Norwegian hotels, the build has less time and the season is tighter.

Inside, the arrangement is familiar: cold sleeping rooms with ice beds and insulated bedding, a chapel and a bar cut from ice, themed suites that change annually, and heated pavilions nearby holding the bathrooms, the spa and the reception. Day visitors tour the building during opening hours, which makes this the most public of the ice hotels listed here. The Nordic-style spa on the site runs alongside the ice building through the season, and the two are used together: the cold hotel for a night, the warm buildings for everything else. Most guests spend one night in the ice rooms and the rest in nearby hotels.

Hôtel de Glace is the only entry in this section outside Europe and Japan, and the only one in Canada. That places it alongside the four Canadian casino hotels in this index, though the two sections have nothing else in common. It is worth reading against Sorrisniva, which builds annually as well but sits far enough north that its season is set by the Arctic rather than by the calendar.

The site is a river valley in Finnmark, and the family that runs it also operates a year-round lodge and a river boat business from the same ground. The winter hotel is put up on that site each season, carved rather than moulded in much of its detail, with ice sculpture worked into the walls of the corridors and the sleeping rooms.

Latitude is the practical difference here. Alta sits far enough north that the polar night runs through the middle of the season, and the aurora is a routine part of the winter sky rather than an occasional event. That shapes the programme around the hotel more than the building itself: the day is spent outside, on the river or in the hills, and the ice rooms are used for one night by most guests before they move to the warm lodge. The building is put up over several weeks in early winter, and it is dismantled or left to melt when the season closes. The lodge beside it, which stays open all year, absorbs the guests who arrive outside the ice season.

Among the ice hotels listed here, Sorrisniva is the one most closely tied to a single family operation and a single river. Icehotel is larger and more of an institution, SnowVillage changes shape more radically, and Arctic SnowHotel sits closer to a city. This one reads as a working Arctic property that builds a hotel out of its own winter.

The site sits by a lake outside Rovaniemi, and it operates as a small complex rather than a single building. The snow hotel holds the sleeping rooms, an ice restaurant and an ice bar; warm buildings nearby hold the sauna, the bathrooms and the reception. Glass-roofed cabins on the property are open through the year, which gives the operation something to sell when the snow structure is gone.

The published season is the detail worth recording. Where several hotels in this section open when the weather allows, this one states its dates, which makes planning simpler and makes the seasonality of the format obvious. By April the building is no longer standing. Everything inside it, including the furniture and the bar, is made of the same material as the walls and goes the same way. Because the dates are published in advance, this is the easiest hotel in the section to plan around, which matters for a format where a mild winter can move an opening by weeks. The index records the stated season rather than an estimate.

Compared with the other Finnish entry in this section, Arctic SnowHotel is the more conventional operation and SnowVillage is the more theatrical one. Compared with Sorrisniva and Icehotel, it is the one closest to a city, since Rovaniemi has an airport with regular winter services and the transfer is short. That accessibility is the main reason it appears in this index.

The village is closer to a built exhibition than a fixed hotel plan. Each season it is laid out again, with a different footprint and a different design brief, and sculptors work the interiors to match. That has included themes drawn from film and television in past years, which makes SnowVillage the entry in this section that most openly treats the building as a subject rather than a shelter.

The accommodation itself follows the standard pattern for the format. Sleeping rooms are held below freezing, insulated bedding is provided, and warm buildings on the site hold the bathrooms, the sauna and the restaurant. There is an ice bar and a chapel in most years, though what exists in any given winter depends on the design that season. Sculptors from several countries work on the interiors before opening, and the finished village is opened to day visitors as well as to overnight guests. That gives the build an audience beyond the people staying in it, which in turn shapes what gets built.

For this index the point of interest is that the annual rebuild is used differently here from Jukkasjärvi. Icehotel changes its art suites within a stable plan; SnowVillage changes the plan. The result is that returning guests get a different building rather than a different set of rooms, and the photographs from one season describe a hotel that no longer exists.

Tomamu sits in central Hokkaidō, where the winter is long and reliably cold, and the village is assembled on the resort grounds each season. It is closer to a small settlement than to a single hotel: a cluster of domes and blocks holding a café, a bar, a shop, a chapel and a skating surface, lit at night and open to day visitors from the surrounding hotels.

The overnight component is a small part of that. A limited ice accommodation is offered within the village, with the warm facilities of the resort available a short distance away. That arrangement is the reverse of the European hotels in this section, where the ice building is the property and the resort is built around it. Here the resort came first and the ice village is a winter addition to it. The ice buildings are lit after dark, and the village is at its busiest in the evening rather than during the day. Most people who visit are staying in the resort hotels rather than in the ice structure itself.

It is also the only entry in this section from Asia, and the only one attached to a large ski operation. Reading it against Icehotel or Sorrisniva shows how differently the same idea behaves depending on what surrounds it. In Lapland the ice building is the reason to travel; at Tomamu it is one thing to do on a mountain that is busy for other reasons.