ICEHOTEL 365
Jukkasjärvi, Sweden
Jukkasjärvi is a village of a few hundred people in Swedish Lapland, two hundred kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, and it has been building a hotel out of the Torne River every winter since 1989. ICEHOTEL 365 is the part that never melts.
It stays frozen through July on solar power. Midnight sun in this latitude runs for weeks, and the panels drive the cooling plant that holds the permanent wing at a steady sub-zero temperature — a closed loop that lets the art suites stand all year instead of being carved and lost each spring.
Those suites are the reason it sits in this index. Artists are selected annually and each carves a room to their own design from snice — a snow-and-ice mix sprayed onto forms — so the interior is re-authored on a schedule. Guests sleep on ice blocks under reindeer hides in thermal bags, then thaw out in the warm building next door, where the bathrooms and the sauna live.