About the board

There are four categories because four is what we can keep honest: art hotels, capsule hotels, casino hotels and ice hotels. Adding a fifth would mean writing about buildings we have not thought about properly.

What an entry is

Each entry describes a real building — where it stands, how it is put together, and what shape a stay there takes. We write from the character of the property rather than from a feature list. That means prose, not tables, and general facts that hold true rather than figures that go stale within a season.

What an entry is not

No star ratings. No guest reviews, invented or collected. No prices, no availability, no booking. If you decide a property is worth a night, you will book it with the hotel or with whichever agent you already use.

Why these four

They sit at four corners of the same question. An art hotel asks what a room can hold. A capsule hotel asks how little a room needs to be. A casino hotel is a hotel with an unusually large ground floor. An ice hotel exists for a few months and then does not. Read together, they cover more ground than a longer, blander list would.

Why the ice list is short

Because the supply is genuinely small. There are a handful of ice hotels rebuilt each winter, and we would rather run one entry we can stand behind than pad the category out.

Corrections

Buildings change hands, close for renovation, and sometimes stop being what we described. If you spot something out of date, the contact page is the shortest route to fixing it.