3 entries
Hotels where the building and its contents are the reason to stay. This movement gathers three properties that treat art and design as the substance of the place rather than as decoration applied at the end: a Neoclassical apartment house in Barcelona kept largely as it was found, a palazzo in Rome standing on the remains of an imperial bath complex, and a small house in Cape Town built around a courtyard and furnished by makers from the region. None of them runs a gallery programme or asks to be interpreted. Each simply gives a guest a great deal to look at, and the pleasure of the stay is in noticing it slowly.
Read Movement I
3 entries
Hotels that shrink the private room deliberately and spend what they save elsewhere — on location, on shared space, or on price. This movement covers three approaches to the same idea: a pod hotel in Tokyo that divides the night into washing, sleeping and leaving; a compact-room hotel on a Soho side street in London that trades floor area for an address; and a standardised prefabricated room in Kuala Lumpur paired with an unusually generous communal floor. In each case the compression is stated openly, which is what makes it work.
Read Movement II
4 entries
Four Canadian casino hotels, described as hotels first. Each is a resort property with rooms, restaurants, a theatre or performance room and a spa or equivalent, and each has a gaming floor as one feature among several. What separates them is setting: an Expo 67 pavilion on an island in the Saint Lawrence, a tower on the escarpment directly above the Horseshoe Falls, a riverside resort on Vancouver's rapid transit line, and a First Nation–owned resort in Ontario's lake country. Guests who never set foot on the gaming floor will still find the stay makes sense.
Read Movement III
1 entry
Structures built from snow and ice, occupied for a few weeks or months, and then allowed to melt. This movement holds a single entry. Ice hotels are genuinely rare — a handful of sites worldwide rebuild each winter, and several have already been written about elsewhere in this index — so rather than pad the list with a property invented for the purpose, one is offered here and described properly. It is rebuilt from nothing each season in Finnish Lapland, and no two winters produce the same building.
Read Movement IV
