Category four · Four hotels

Ice Hotels

Hotels made from snow and ice, rebuilt each winter and gone by spring. Rooms are held a few degrees below freezing, the beds sit on ice blocks under thermal bedding, and the plumbing lives in a heated building next door. Nothing here is permanent, which is the point.

Snowman World Igloo Hotel

Rovaniemi, Finland

Part of a winter park on the edge of Rovaniemi, the igloo hotel is rebuilt every season with snow rooms, an ice restaurant and an ice bar under the same roof of packed snow. Guests sleep in thermal sleeping bags on ice beds, then thaw out in a heated service building with showers and a sauna.

It is the least remote hotel in this category — the airport and the town are both minutes away — which makes it the easiest one to try for a single night. Around it the park runs sledging slopes and reindeer and husky rides, so the hotel is one part of a larger winter operation.

Bâlea Lac Ice Hotel

Făgăraș Mountains, Romania

Romania's ice hotel is assembled each winter beside a glacial lake at around two thousand metres, above the tree line on the Transfăgărășan road. In deep winter the road is closed and the only way up is a cable car, which makes arrival part of the experience rather than a transfer.

The blocks are cut from the frozen lake itself, and the building usually includes an ice bar and a small chapel alongside the rooms. Because the site is so exposed, the hotel comes with a mountain-refuge discipline: heated cabins nearby for washing, hot food, and staff who watch the weather closely.

Snow Village

Kittilä, Finnish Lapland

Snow Village is rebuilt from scratch every December in Lapland, and each edition is given a design theme that shapes the carving throughout — corridors, restaurant, chapel and rooms all executed by a team of sculptors over several weeks. Nothing is reused; the whole village melts in spring.

Guests staying the night get a briefing on how to sleep warm before they are handed a sleeping bag, and warm accommodation is available on the same site for anyone who would rather look than stay. The bar is carved from ice, including the glasses.

Aurora Ice Museum at Chena Hot Springs Resort

Chena Hot Springs, Alaska, United States

Chena Hot Springs is a year-round resort an hour outside Fairbanks, and its ice building is unusual in that it does not melt: a refrigeration system keeps the sculpted interior frozen through the Alaskan summer. Inside there are carved rooms, chandeliers of ice and a bar with ice glasses.

Overnight guests sleep in the resort's heated lodging rather than in the ice building, and use it the way they use the geothermal pools — as one of the things this place has that nowhere else nearby does. The same hot springs that heat the resort also power the plant that keeps the ice frozen.

Reading the category

Every hotel in this category is temporary by design, and three of the four will not exist in August. That changes how you should read them: there is no accumulated patina, no worn carpet, no long-serving bar. Each winter the building is new, the carving is new, and the only continuity is the crew who come back to cut it again.