Ice Hotels

This is built as a castle rather than as a lodge: snow walls and towers raised on the shore of the Gulf of Bothnia, enclosing rather than sheltering. Inside those walls sit a hotel, a restaurant and a chapel, all made of the same material as the fortifications around them. The design changes from season to season, because the whole thing is raised again each winter and never repeats exactly.

The outer walls make a courtyard, and the rooms with the public spaces are set within that enclosure, so the plan is a perimeter with the rest held inside. Sleeping chambers open directly off internal passages. The chapel and the restaurant take the largest vaults.

The castle stands at the harbour of Kemi, at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia in Finnish Lapland. The frozen sea is in front of it in winter, the town behind, and an icebreaker works from the same stretch of coast.

Two kinds of sleeping are offered here, and they are built quite differently. One is a snow structure, raised again each winter and carved inside. The other is a set of glass igloos, permanent domes with transparent roofs meant for watching the sky. They stand near each other on the same site in the forest outside Rovaniemi.

Snow rooms open off the internal corridors of a single low structure, all on one level. The glass igloos stand apart as separate units in the open, spaced so each keeps its own view of the sky. Saunas and heated service buildings sit in ordinary construction between the two.

The site lies in forest outside Rovaniemi, in Finnish Lapland close to the Arctic Circle. The city and its airport are a drive away through pine and lake country, and the ground around the buildings stays under snow for the whole of the season.

The village is raised again every winter and given a new theme, so the carving inside is different from one season to the next and the plan follows whatever the theme asks for. Snow makes the walls and vaults, and ice makes the bar, the seats and the sculpture. Because nothing survives the thaw, the builders are not repairing an old structure but starting from open ground each year.

Passages link a series of chambers, and the carved rooms open off them in sequence, which is why the place is described as a village rather than a house. The ice bar takes one of the larger vaults. Heights change because a wider snow vault must be raised higher.

Lainio lies in the Kittilä district of Finnish Lapland, in forest and fell country north of the Arctic Circle. The ski slopes of Levi are a drive away, and the land immediately around is snow-covered forest with very little built on it.