Scan Magazine | Special Theme | Swedish Winter Wonderland
Offering the same, cool experience as the original ICEHOTEL, ICEHOTEL 365 is open all year round and comes with extra comforts such as heated en-suite bathrooms.
Ice, ice baby Spend the day chasing the northern lights or river rafting down one of Europe’s last wild rivers, and then cosy up in a sleeping bag in your very own mini ice art museum. A stay at ICEHOTEL in Swedish Lapland may be cold – but it will warm your heart for a very long time. By Linnea Dunne | Photos: Asaf Kliger
Originally from France, and having spent a number of years working in Gothenburg before he relocated to Jukkasjärvi 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, Christophe Risenius is adamant that one of the best things about Sweden is a harmony between environment and culture. As CEO of ICEHOTEL, he gets to work with exactly that. “You could call it an art experience in an Arctic environment,” he says. “For almost 30 years now, we’ve been offering a classic, seasonal ice hotel, designed and built to open in a new guise around mid-December every year 46 | Issue 107 | December 2017
and stay open until it melts in the spring, around the beginning of May. But since last year, we also have a brand-new year-round product called ICEHOTEL 365 – a permanent structure of 20 suites, 11 art suites and nine deluxe suites. It’s the first product in the world of its kind.” ICEHOTEL first came about as a result of the entrepreneur Yngve Bergqvist’s travels in 1989 to a number of cold places across the globe, which convinced him that it would be possible to build a tourist attraction purely out of ice in the north of
Sweden. He started with a specially designed igloo for housing an ice art exhibition, and eventually the world’s first ever ice hotel was constructed. Since then, it has grown year on year, and the hotel itself is rebuilt every year using around 30,000 tonnes of snow and 4,000 tonnes of ice, including an ice church, a restaurant, conferencing facilities and the wellknown ICEBAR BY ICEHOTEL. “It’s a pretty significant construction project,” says Risenius. “It takes five or six weeks every year just to build the structures – there are a lot of people involved. But it’s important to highlight as well that it’s about much more than just construction. Every year, we develop a new concept, inviting artists from all over the world to present ideas through a competition, with a jury selecting the artists who