Ice Hotels

A hotel carved and cast from scratch every winter on the slope at Levi, and allowed to melt every spring.

Luvattumaa is rebuilt each season, which means it is never quite the same hotel twice. Teams work through late autumn packing snow onto forms and cutting clear ice for the detailing; by midwinter there are corridors, a bar, a chapel and a set of sleeping chambers, each one sculpted around a theme chosen for that year.

Guests sleep on ice beds insulated with reindeer hides, in expedition-grade bags, with the interior holding a steady sub-zero temperature regardless of the weather outside. Washrooms, changing rooms and a warm building are a short walk away, and the practice is well drilled: staff brief you before you turn in, and there is always somewhere heated to retreat to.

Levi itself is a working ski resort, so the ice hotel sits alongside lifts, restaurants and a village. That combination — one night in the cold structure, the rest in a normal room — is how most people use it, and it is the sensible way round.

Sleeping quarters inside a snow castle raised annually on the shore of the Gulf of Bothnia.

Kemi has built a castle of snow at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia every winter for decades, and the SnowHotel is the part of it you can book. The complex is genuinely large — courtyards, a restaurant, a chapel used for weddings, corridors wide enough that groups pass without ducking — and its shape is redesigned each year.

The hotel rooms are cut into the structure’s walls: snow chambers with ice-block detailing, a bed built up from packed snow, hides, and a sleeping bag rated for the cold. They are lit low and are very quiet, snow being an excellent way to remove sound. A heated service building holds the showers, saunas and lockers.

The city is also where icebreaker cruises leave from and where the sea freezes solid enough to walk on, so the surrounding day is as much a part of the stay as the night. Warm accommodation on the same site covers guests who would rather look at the castle than sleep in it.

A single ice-built suite inside a winter village of ice buildings in the Hokkaido mountains.

Hoshino Resorts assembles an ice village at Tomamu every winter — a small settlement of domes and shops made of ice, with an ice bar, an ice café, a rink and a skating path linking them, open after dark and lit for it. The hotel piece of this is deliberately singular: one ice suite, occupied by one party at a time.

The room is built entirely from ice and snow, furniture included, with a bed insulated and layered for warmth. Guests have access to the village after the day visitors have gone, which is the real luxury on offer here — the whole frozen settlement, quiet, for a couple of hours.

It is unlike the Nordic ice hotels in scale and in tone: this is a resort attraction executed with Japanese precision, attached to a large mountain hotel that supplies the warmth, the bathing and the breakfast on either side of the night.

A snow hotel near the Barents Sea coast that stays standing when the rest of the category has melted.

Kirkenes lies far up in Norway’s northeast, close to the Russian border and the Barents Sea. The Snowhotel here is unusual in the category because it is refrigerated and kept open year round, so it can be visited in July as readily as in January — an ice corridor entered from a summer afternoon is a strange and memorable thing.

Rooms are snow chambers with ice sculpture worked into the walls, beds dressed with hides and sleeping bags, and a temperature held just below freezing. The site also runs heated cabins on the water for guests who want the ice experience without the ice night, plus a restaurant, a sauna and a large husky yard.

What sells it is the surroundings as much as the building: king crab fishing under the ice, the aurora in the dark months, the midnight sun in the light ones, and a landscape of low fells and inlets that feels genuinely remote without being difficult to reach.