The Margin

An entry here has two halves. The column carries the writing. The margin carries the part you act on.

Why the paragraphs are lettered

Each entry runs to three paragraphs, and each one is lettered so that a note can point back at it. A is the place: the street or the shore, the town nearby, the weather that decides what the stay feels like. B is the building: what it was made for, who changed it, and what survived that change. C is the night: the room, the bed, the shared bathroom if there is one, and the sound you will hear at three in the morning.

The letters exist for the margin. A note marked B is talking about the building, and a note marked C is talking about the night. On a wide screen the notes sit in a column to the right of the paragraph they belong to. On a phone the margin folds into the text, and each note lands directly beneath its own paragraph, in the same order.

The four notes

Season says when the hotel makes sense, and sometimes when it exists at all. Half the ice hotels in this guide are water for part of the year. Getting there is the practical line: the airport, the ferry, the train, the length of the last stretch by road. The Fabric says what the place is physically made of, because stone, plywood, steel, glass and packed snow do not behave alike at night. Ask at check-in is one question worth putting to the person at the desk: which side your room faces, where the luggage goes, when the bath closes.

A note is practical and never critical. It will tell you that the bathrooms are shared, that the ferry runs twice a day, that the season ends in March. It will not tell you that a hotel is worth your time, because that is a judgement about you rather than about the hotel, and we do not have the information to make it.

Where the material comes from

Everything on this site is compiled from published sources: hotel websites and their own descriptions, architectural writing about the buildings, museum and civic material where the building has a public history. The guide has been kept since 2020 by two writers and a photographer, working from different countries, with no office between them.

We do not publish accounts of our own stays, and no entry should be read as a report from a night spent in the room. Each entry ends with the month it was last read against its sources, which is the only date that means anything here. When something has changed, write to us and it gets re-read.

What is not published

No prices, no star classifications, no ratings or scores, no ranking of one hotel above another. No booking, no availability, no enquiry passed on to a hotel. No paid placements, no affiliate links and no commissions of any kind. A hotel cannot buy its way into these eighteen entries, and it cannot buy its way out of them either.

Why there are Casino Hotels here

Four Canadian hotels in this guide have a gaming floor inside them. They are here for the same reason as the other fourteen: one occupies the pavilions built for a world exhibition in 1967, one is cut into the cliff above a waterfall, one stands on a working river with its own marina, one belongs to a First Nation and sits in lake country.

What we describe in those four entries is the building, the rooms, the restaurants, the concert hall, the spa and the view. The gaming floor is not described, not counted and not assessed, and nothing on this site encourages anyone to go near it. The section is called Casino Hotels because that is what those hotels are, and calling them something softer would be less honest, not more.