Seasonal hotels rebuilt each winter from snow and river ice.
Entries
Four
Selection
Editorial
01
Context
About this category
An ice hotel is a building with an expiry date. Most are cut from snow and river ice in late autumn, opened for a single winter season, and allowed to melt in spring, which means the floor plan is redrawn every year and no two seasons are alike. Sleeping in one is a short, cold, well-supervised exercise — an expedition bag, a briefing, a heated building a few metres away. Three of the four below are exactly that. The fourth is included with a caveat stated in its entry, because the structure is worth knowing about even though the beds are elsewhere.
01
SnowHotel Kemi
Kemi, Finland
Kemi has been building in snow since 1996, and the SnowHotel is one wing of a much larger structure on the shore of the Gulf of Bothnia that is raised again each winter — restaurant, chapel, a maze of corridors, and rooms held a couple of degrees below freezing. Guests sleep in expedition bags on ice beds with reindeer hides over them, then take breakfast in a heated building next door. Glass villas on the waterfront cover the other half of the offer, for anyone who wants the sky without the cold.
Part of the SnowCastle complex
Snow rooms plus glass villas
On the Gulf of Bothnia
02
Tromsø Ice Domes
Tromsø, Norway
Inland from Tromsø, in a valley that holds its cold better than the coast, the Ice Domes are cut fresh each winter and carved by returning sculptors, so the rooms change character from one season to the next. There is a bar where everything including the glassware is ice, a cinema dome, and a small number of suites for overnight guests. The site is dark enough for the aurora and far enough from the city to be silent. Heated service buildings and a sauna sit alongside, which is how most people manage the night.
Rebuilt each season in a mountain valley
Ice bar and sculpted suites
Forty minutes inland from Tromsø
03
Snowman World Igloo Hotel
Rovaniemi, Finland
Snowman World sits on the Arctic Circle just outside Rovaniemi, and its igloo hotel is the quietest part of a site that is otherwise busy with day visitors, slides and an ice bar. Rooms are true snow rooms — domed, windowless, lit low, with the bed built up from ice and dressed in hides and a rated sleeping bag. The restaurant next door is carved from ice as well. The Arctic Circle line runs through the grounds, which accounts for a good deal of the traffic during daylight hours.
Igloo-form snow rooms
Ice restaurant and ice bar
Beside the Arctic Circle at Rovaniemi
04
Aurora Ice Museum, Chena Hot Springs Resort
Fairbanks, Alaska
An honest exception in this category, and worth stating plainly: the ice building at Chena Hot Springs is a museum and bar rather than a hotel wing, and overnight guests sleep in the resort's heated rooms and cabins. The structure itself is unusual enough to belong here — carved chambers, ice chandeliers and a bar kept frozen through an Alaskan summer by a refrigeration system the resort runs off its own geothermal power. Outside, the hot springs are the other reason people drive the sixty miles from Fairbanks.