Preface
Four categories, one question
This index exists because four kinds of hotel that have almost nothing else in common each ask the same question of a guest: what, exactly, are you paying the building to do for you.i An art hotel asks you to look. A capsule hotel asks you to need very little for one night. A casino hotel asks you to stay put, because everything is already indoors. An ice hotel asks you to accept that the room will not exist in June.
The entries below are written as prose, not as specification sheets. That is a deliberate editorial choice: a table of attributes flattens the one thing worth knowing about a property, which is usually its temperament rather than its amenity list.ii Where a fact is useful in isolation — a category, a building type, a season — it is set beside the text as a numbered margin note, in the manner of a journal footnote moved out of the gutter and into the margin.
Nothing here is booked, brokered or ranked. There are no stars, no scores and no reviews, invented or otherwise. Properties are described from their general, durable character: what the building is, what it was built to do, and what a guest will find is true of it in most seasons and most years.
The index
Categories
Art Hotels
Hotels where a collection, a commission programme or a working studio culture shapes the building rather than decorating it.1
Capsule Hotels
Compact-berth hotels built around a shared floor plan: a sealed sleeping unit, communal washing, and a lobby that does the rest.2
Casino Hotels
Hotels whose properties include a gaming floor among their facilities, described here first as places to stay.3
Ice Hotels
Seasonal hotels rebuilt each winter from snow and river ice, with warm quarters kept alongside the cold rooms.4