Rooms in strange buildings
Some buildings were never meant to hold beds. A monastery hospital, a pavilion left over from a world fair, a hall of packed river ice, a floor of berths narrow enough to sit up in — each of them now rents a place to sleep. This site collects addresses of that kind and describes what the building actually is.
What is written here comes from what the hotels publish about themselves, from mapping and municipal records, and from reporting that names its sources. Where a claim could not be traced, it was left out rather than smoothed over. There are no prices, no stars, no marks of quality and nothing to book.
- Art HotelsOlder city buildings — a palace, a hospital, an apartment house — rebuilt as hotels with the earlier work left visible.
- Casino HotelsCanadian resorts taken as buildings and public rooms: theatres, restaurants, spas and the ground they stand on.
- Ice HotelsHalls cut from river ice and packed snow in the far north, opened for the cold months and gone by summer.
- Capsule HotelsCompact sleeping — berths, cabins and small lofts — where the room is about the size of the bed.
Where this comes from
Every address on this site is a working hotel, named as its owners name it. Facts are taken from the hotel's own pages, from maps and civic records, and from published writing that can be checked. A year appears only when a source states it. Anything that could not be confirmed was cut from the sentence instead of hedged.
The winter buildings need more care than the rest: they are made of snow and ice, they are put up again from nothing each season, and their dates move with the weather. Nothing here is a booking, a quote or a promise about what will be standing. Write to the hotel for anything current. Where this comes from sets out the method in full.
Every address on one page: The list.