How we look inside

Hotels, opened as buildings.

Most hotel writing describes an impression: the light in the lobby, the mood at the bar, how a place made somebody feel. We do something narrower. We describe the building — what it was made of and made for, and how the space behind the front door is divided. An impression belongs to one visit. A layout stays the same after everyone has gone home.

Each entry has three blocks of prose. THE WHOLE THING is the building seen from outside and as a whole: its age, what it was originally built to do, and what a passer-by can see. HOW IT'S ARRANGED is the inside: wings, courtyards, tiers, aisles, corridors cut through snow. WHAT'S NEXT TO IT is the ground around the door — the street, the water, the slope, the terminal, the village.

You will notice that the middle block avoids exact figures. That is deliberate. We are describing a principle, not a specification: rooms running along two wings around a court, capsules stacked in two tiers beside one aisle, chambers cut into both sides of a single passage. Counting floors and units from a distance produces numbers that go stale and were never ours to publish.

ROUTE IN is one line about getting there and what to settle beforehand — a car that cannot stop at the door, lanes too narrow for wheeled luggage, a season that has to be checked. It is preparation, not a complaint. Every hotel here is a working business, and the line exists so that arriving is easier, not so that anyone is warned off.

NOTED carries a month and a year. It is the month in which we last went back over the published sources for that entry. It is not an inspection date and it is not a claim that we were there.

The four colours that fill the tops of the entries mean nothing at all. They run in order — first, second, third, fourth, then round again — so that neighbouring entries never share a colour and the page stays readable. Colour here is rhythm. It does not sort hotels into kinds, and nothing should be read into it.

Our material comes from published sources: the hotels' own sites and press material, architectural publications, museum and heritage records, and building descriptions written by the people who did the work. Three of us have run the guide since 2021, and we work remotely, reading plans and elevations rather than visiting. We do not publish accounts of staying anywhere, because we do not have them.

Some things are never published here: prices, star classifications, ratings, availability, booking links and paid placements. We take no commission and we do not accept payment to add, change or remove an entry. If a hotel or a reader shows us that we have described a building wrongly, we correct it and move the month on.

An international guide about buildings will meet casino hotels sooner or later, and four of them are here, all in Canada. They earn their place the same way as everything else: one occupies pavilions from a world's fair, one is cut into a cliff above a waterfall, one has a marina, one spreads across lakeside ground. We do not describe the gaming floor, we do not assess it, and nothing on this site encourages anyone to gamble.

What we describe is how a building is laid out, taken from published sources and put in our own words. Nothing here is a plan, a specification or a promise about a stay, and the month at the foot of an entry is when we last checked those sources.