Ice Accommodations

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The Ice Hotel

Accommodations in one of the coldest parts of Sweden offer a frozen place to rest your head.

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Bergh has a dreamy, philosophical air about him.

"Sometimes when I look into the ice I see the sky, I see the emptiness. The inside is the outside," he said, adding that it's the specific flow of the river that makes the ice distinctive. "The conditions are perfect. It's slowly moving, so air bubbles don't get stuck in the ice. If it's too fast moving it wouldn't be as thick . . . It's like frozen time."

So Bergh has a strict rule for the few dozen artists who come each year to create the hotel and craft the suites that amount to individual works of art: They have to work with what nature has supplied, and nothing else. "There are two colors: white and transparent, and then there's the light," he said.

The artists -- many of whom have never worked with ice before -- take anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks to complete their given ice suites. Coming from countries that include Bulgaria, Russia, Sweden and the United States, their backgrounds are as varied as the suites they design. Among the 2006-07 season artists, Mats Nilsson is a fourth-generation stone sculptor from Sweden; Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman has worked in Melbourne since 2001 as a set designer, illustrator, photographer, puppeteer and installation artist.

Doug Meerdink is an art director in Los Angeles, and David E. Scott is a graphic designer there. The two designed the first room I stayed in, the Helices. It consisted of an oval ice bed lying in front of a sort of clam-shaped sculpture carved into the snowy wall above it. Two corners of the room featured curved, patterned walls, which gave it a sort of glacial feng-shui flow.

The sculpting crew included veterans and novices. Michael Jermann, a freelance product and graphic designer from Germany, had never worked with ice or snow before designing the room Flowing Edge, which I stayed in my second night. At first glance, I thought the room was pedestrian because it lacked the intricate carving of other suites. It was only after I had spent some time in it that I realized its simplicity helped put guests in a sort of zone, lulled by the undulating shapes Jermann had sculpted.

While a few colored lights illuminate a couple tiny portions of the hotel, this is no Christmas tree extravaganza. In fact, Bergqvist and Bergh split with the Canadian ice hotel, which was an offshoot of their venture and now goes under the name Hotel de Glace, because they decided the Quebec hotel's penchant for colored illumination and less-elegant sculpture was just, well, tacky.

In Jukkasjarvi, the Swedes have mastered the art of making do with what nature gave them. "At first, it sounds like an exotic idea -- who would come up with something so crazy?" But, Bergh reasoned, it is an obvious response to the Arctic environs. "It's in front of you. What do you have here? It's bloody cold. Darkness. Aurora borealis. The ice and the snow. So those are the ingredients, and you cook them together."

The 22 individualized suites were stunning in their originality. One, designed by two graffiti artists, from Ireland and England, resembled a traditional English country lord's estate, complete with sitting chairs and a faux fireplace. Another evoked a Turkish bath, complete with pillars. And a third gave guests the sensation of being tucked inside a hot-air balloon, where the bed took on the form of a woven basket and sleepers looked straight into the pillowy, concave form of the balloon's ceiling.

The Ice Bar, however, is where visitors actually spend most of their time. Bergqvist, who is more a visionary than a traditional entrepreneur, realized soon after starting the hotel that he needed some corporate sponsorship if he was going to survive financially. As he tells the story, it was exposure to intense heat, rather than the cold, that gave him the inspiration to enlist Swedish vodka maker Absolut in his business venture.

In the early 1990s, "we got a brilliant idea one day when we were sitting in the sauna," he said. "How could we let people know what we were doing? We wanted to send a press release around the world. Suddenly, we were dropping that and drinking beer."

This is the problem with dreaming up your business model in a sauna: It becomes too hot, you have to leave to grab a beer, and you forget your big idea. Luckily, Bergqvist and his friends remembered the next day what they had been discussing, most likely because they had reentered the sauna at some point.