Ice hotels that melt every spring. A bedroom under the sea in the Maldives. A lighthouse in PEI, a jumbo jet at Stockholm airport, giraffes at the breakfast window in Nairobi. These are the stays people send each other at midnight saying we have to go here — checked one by one against each property's own site, and sorted by what makes them strange.
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Hotels carved out of snow and river ice each winter — and melted away each spring. Sleeping in one is a race against the thaw, which is exactly the appeal.
North America's only true ice hotel, rebuilt each winter at Village Vacances Valcartier and open roughly January to March.
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A hotel rebuilt every winter from snow and ice blocks cut from the frozen Torne River; it melts back into the river each spring.
A snow hotel near the Russian border that stays open 365 days a year, kept frozen through summer with cooling technology.
An igloo hotel sculpted fresh each winter on the banks of the Alta River, with an ice chapel and ice bar.
Rooms cut into cave dwellings, monastery cliffs and volcanic rock. The walls in these places are older than the idea of hotels by a few thousand years.
A former Byzantine monastery and caravanserai restored into cave rooms and stone mansions above Pigeon Valley.
Suites carved into the volcanic caldera cliff of Oia, in cave houses that were once 17th-century wine cellars.
A 17th-century Dominican monastery turned hotel, standing alone on a cliff edge between Amalfi and Positano.
A hotel carved into Cappadocia's ancient cave dwellings and fair-chimney rock, decorated with registered museum antiques.
Rooms inside the prehistoric cave dwellings of Matera's Sassi, a UNESCO-listed troglodyte settlement.
Transparent sleeping capsules bolted to a cliff face 400 metres above the Sacred Valley; you climb or zipline in, and rappel out.
Bedrooms below the surface, where the fish do the people-watching. Some you reach by ladder, one you reach by scuba diving through a moon pool.
Its Underwater Suites look through floor-to-ceiling glass into the Ambassador Lagoon aquarium and its 65,000 marine animals.
Home to The Muraka, a two-level residence whose master bedroom sits 5 metres below the Indian Ocean's surface.
A former research station 9 metres under a lagoon in Key Largo; guests scuba-dive down to enter through a moon pool.
Its Underwater Room floats offshore from Pemba Island, with a bedroom submerged 4 metres below the surface among the reef.
A one-room floating art project on Lake Mälaren: a small house above the water, a bedroom 3 metres below it.
Spheres in the rainforest, mirrored cubes in the pines, villas in the canopy. Treehouses grew up; the stairs just got longer.
Hand-crafted spherical treehouses suspended in the coastal rainforest of Vancouver Island, reached by spiral staircases.
Tree houses built 10 metres up in a native manuka grove on a deer farm, between the Kaikōura ranges and the sea.
Treehouse villas nested in the rainforest canopy above Kamala village, each with its own pool.
An eco-resort on a private Pacific beach whose signature room is a two-storey treehouse around a living palm.
Architect-designed rooms in the pines of Swedish Lapland, including a mirrored cube and a room shaped like a UFO.
Clear roofs built for one purpose: watching the northern lights, or the stars, without getting out of bed.
Aurora cabins and glass-roofed wagons on a lakeside ranch near Rovaniemi, just below the Arctic Circle.
Geodesic domes on a forested mountainside above the St. Lawrence River, in the Charlevoix hills near Baie-Saint-Paul.
Geodesic domes modelled on the shelters of the region's nomadic peoples, inside Torres del Paine National Park.
Transparent bubble domes in private woodland on the shore of Lower Lough Erne, for sleeping under the stars.
The resort that made glass igloos famous: heated domes with clear roofs for watching the northern lights from bed.
Glass-roofed igloo suites on a fell slope above Levi, built so the aurora and the Arctic sky are the ceiling.
Glass aurora chalets outside Whitehorse with panoramic windows angled at the northern sky.
Glamping domes and stargazing cabins in the woods of New Brunswick's Kingston Peninsula, near the Kennebecasis River.
Five geodesic domes and a treehouse on 50 wooded acres in Mount Tryon, PEI, each dome with its own hot tub.
Geodesic pods on an Alpine meadow at 1,400 metres, each heated by its own wood stove and reached on foot or by snowshoe.
Working lights and keepers' cottages where guests fall asleep to the sea — and in two of them, to the soft hum of the lamp itself.
A still-active 1815 Stevenson lighthouse on the Rhins of Galloway, where guests sleep in the former keepers' cottages.
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A Victorian lighthouse station on an island in San Francisco Bay, run as a dinner-and-bed-and-breakfast since 1980.
A working 1867 lighthouse on La Palma whose keeper's house is now a small hotel, with a skypool inside the lighthouse grounds.
Guests sleep in the 1894 keeper's house beside Heceta Head Light, one of the most photographed lighthouses on the US coast.
Rooms inside PEI's tallest lighthouse, a working 1875 light at the island's western tip; two rooms are in the tower itself.
An 1821 lighthouse at the mouth of the River Usk, converted into a small hotel with a rooftop hot tub beside the lamp.
Castles that take guests: portcullises, royal visits in the guest book, and 900 years of other people's drama in the walls.
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A 900-year-old fortified castle in the South Downs whose portcullis still drops at night behind the guests.
A castle founded in 1228 on the shore of Lough Corrib, once the Guinness family estate, now one of Ireland's landmark hotels.
The 'Castle in the Rockies': a baronial railway hotel opened in 1888 above the Bow Falls in Banff National Park.
The castle-hotel above Old Quebec, opened in 1893 and often called the most photographed hotel in the world.
A 19th-century baronial mansion in the foothills of Ben Nevis, where Queen Victoria stayed in 1873.
A Tudor castle where Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn stayed in 1535; the only Tudor castle in England operating as a hotel.
A 747 at the airport, a prison that locks you in voluntarily, a crane over the docks. Buildings that retired from one job and took up hospitality.
Three suites stacked inside a 50-metre industrial crane on Amsterdam's NDSM wharf, with a hot tub on top.
A 19th-century prison turned hotel: the cells became suites, and the cell-block corridors are still intact.
A decommissioned Boeing 747 parked at Arlanda airport, converted into a hostel with rooms in the cabin and a suite in the cockpit.
Eero Saarinen's 1962 TWA Flight Center at JFK, restored as a hotel around its landmark red-carpet terminal.
Nova Scotia's oldest railway station, with rooms in the 1887 station house and in restored cabooses on the tracks outside.
A motel park near Waitomo where you can sleep in a 1950s cargo plane, a train, a ship, or a hobbit house.
The far end of the road — or past it. Lodges you reach by seaplane, boat or helicopter, where the wilderness is not the view, it's the address.
A luxury tented camp in the rainforest of Clayoquot Sound, reachable only by seaplane or boat from Tofino.
An inn on stilts at the edge of the North Atlantic, on an island off an island off Newfoundland; all profits return to the island community.
A floating lodge at the foot of a waterfall in the Great Bear Rainforest, reached by helicopter or boat, with nine cabins.
The ones that refuse a category: a hotel made of salt, suites with no fourth wall, giraffes at the breakfast window.
A 1930s manor in Nairobi's Langata suburb where endangered Rothschild's giraffes poke their heads through the windows at breakfast.
A resort built down the wall of an abandoned quarry: 16 of its 18 floors are below ground, the lowest two underwater.
Suites built without a fourth wall: the bedroom opens entirely to the Pitons and the Caribbean, each with its own infinity pool.
A hotel built almost entirely from salt blocks on the edge of the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat.
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