Every winter for three decades, the makers of the Icehotel have cut their building blocks from the frozen waters of the Torne River in the northern Swedish village of Jukkasjärvi. Strangely, the whole thing started with a local shortage of (regular) rooms: when visitors to an ice art exhibition in the winter of 1989-1990 found that there weren’t enough beds available, a few were allowed to camp out in Arctic-tested sleeping bags amid the sculptures, and an idea was born. There are similar venues in other cold regions of the world, but Sweden’s ice hotel is the original. The prize rooms here are the 15 Art Suites, designed afresh each winter, whose ice and snow sculptures rise to a new level of fantasy. Most visitors come on daytime excursions to tour the rooms and prop up the ice bar, but a night spent cocooned in the chill, snow-muffled air is - while not restful for everyone - always a beautiful, surreal and fleeting experience.
Ice rooms from £350;
icehotel.com
FELINE LAIR, DESIGN BY BRIAN ALVIN MCARTHUR AND DAWN MARIE DETARANDO. PHOTOGRAPH BY ASAF KLIGER/ICEHOTEL.COM