ice hotel

Location

Ice hotel is located in the village of Jukkasjarvi, 200km inside the Arctic Circle in Swedish Lapland. Ice hotel is constructed each year on the banks of the River Torne, which produces wonderfully pure ice. The hotel usually opens in mid-December and closes in April when the spring starts to melt it back into the river. In February and March they start to harvest the ice from the river that will be used in the construction of the following year's hotel - when building starts in October/November the river's ice is not thick enough to use. It is stored during the summer in a frozen hangar, where an exhibition of ice art and an igloo village are also built.

Construction

Every year the layout of the hotel is slightly different, and every room is designed/decorated by a different artist . They receive requests from artists and sculptors the world over to be involved in the project, and actually favour those who have not worked with ice before as it encourages a fresher approach.

Ice Hotel by day is an ice sculpture exhibition, with the rooms as exhibits. The rooms are only available exclusively to guests after 6pm.

Accomodation

Warm accomodation is available! For four of our five nights there we stayed in a very comfortable and normal warm hotel room, part of the permanent buildings that surround the actual Ice Hotel site. We chose to spend our wedding night in the Ice Hotel itself, in the Polar Lux deluxe ice suite. One night in Ice Hotel is all that is recommended, and having done it I can now see why - it is such a one-off, why repeat it?

The Polar Lux suite was designed by David Shelley and Mark Armstrong, English architects who studied at Oxford University. Their inspiration for the room was Lapland's nature and contemporary Scandinavian design. Many of the room's features, such as the bar and the block above the head of the bed, were made up of contrasting bands of snow and ice - reminiscent of something Paul Smith might have designed. Various pictures of the suite can be found in the album section of this site.

After spending a night in Ice Hotel you are given a diploma, which shows the internal and external tempratures that night. It was a period of unseasonable warmth when we were there - normally in February temparatures drop to -35oc but for us it didn't go below -10oc. So rather bizarrely our diploma shows a temperature in the room of -5oc, and +1oc outside! Despite that, we did have an excellent night's sleep once we got comfortable in our double sleeping bag. You sleep in your thermals, wooly hat and socks, and hope that you don't need to go to the toilet in the night as there isn't one in your room! That requires a walk to the luggage room, which also houses the showers.

Eating

There are two places to eat - the Ice Hotel restaurant just across the road, and the Old Homestead in the village. We discovered three things that we will no doubt go mad trying to get in the UK - smoked reindeer, cloudberries and lingonberry juice.

The ice gourmet dinner that we had on our wedding night featured a variety of herb-marinated roe served on ice with sour cream and red onion, smoked racks of reindeer with vegetables and madiera gravy, and sorbet and pistaccio ice cream served in an ice bowl.

Drinking

At the heart of Ice Hotel is the Absolut Ice Bar, a 10m dome which is the only part of the hotel that is chilled - otherwise the heat generated by a bar full of bodies can start to make the ceiling drip! Drinks are famously served not with ice, but in ice - a glass can be seen in the picture above. In addition to a huge range of flavoured vodkas, a variety of very tasty vodka and fruit juice cocktails are available.

The trademark Absolut vodka bottle shape recurs throughout the design, from the shape of the door to the backdrop behind the bar counter itself. The bar is also the only part of the structure that is permanently supported, due to its size.