Ice Machine Isn’t Down the Hall, It Is the Hall

The hottest new hotel in Canada is made of ice. Even the beds. There’s no room service, no mints on the pillow. Heck, there aren’t even flush toilets. But the idea behind the Ice Hotel is less luxury lodging than five-star winter camping. It’s an igloo with an imagination.

Inspired by the original Ishotellet in Sweden, the Ice Hotel Quebec-Canada outside Quebec City is a pristine structure made of frozen water in various shapes. The front door is covered with deer pelts to symbolize a warm welcome, but that’s as cozy as it gets.

The hotel, which opened this month, will host adventurous guests until April or until the ice melts, whichever comes first.

It sleeps 22 guests in its six rooms, each chamber decorated in a different whimsical theme. An antlered moose head carved from ice adorns the Canadian Room. The Philippe Starck Room contains curvy ice chairs inspired by the French designer. In the Salvador Dali Room--also known as the Party Room because it sleeps eight--guests can lounge on two crystalline sofas carved to look like Mae West’s lips. Rooms range in price from about $80 to $185.

Like Claes Oldenburg’s fur-covered ice cream bars, part of the hotel’s artistry is a chance to encounter something familiar made of the unexpected: a frozen fireplace, an ice ink pot and quill, a 400-pound “crystal” chandelier. At the ice bar, candles shimmer in glacial holders and tipplers can huddle in booths and sip shots from ice tumblers--vodka in the rocks.

There is another unexpected thrill to living and sleeping under snow. The light and shadows are constantly changing; the hallways seem to glow. There is a stillness here and a sense of purity and quiet that’s hard to find elsewhere. How many places can you see your breath and hear your heartbeat as you drift off to sleep?

Yes, it is cold. But the hotel’s 4-foot-thick walls provide insulation, keeping temperatures inside about 25 degrees. Each guest is issued a kit of polar wear: insulated pants and parka, boots and an arctic sleeping bag. There is no heat, but there is electricity to power a hot chocolate machine at the ice bar, a computer with a Web cam so guests can e-mail pictures of themselves to friends, and a screening room that shows films such as “Nanook of the North.”

The beds are blocks of ice, lighted from inside so you lie down on a luminous cube. Each is covered with a foam pad, strewn with deer skins and topped with a sleeping bag. Once you’re ensconced, the only thing cold is your nose in the morning--unless you have to get up to visit one of the heated latrines in the middle of the night. The secret to survival is to keep your clothes at the bottom of the sleeping bag so they’re warm in the morning.

Most of the guests at the Ice Hotel are from the United States and countries without a winter--a sheik from Kuwait recently inquired if there was a place to land his plane. So far, only two guests have checked out early, one from the cold, the other from claustrophobia.

Three couples have booked the hotel for the ultimate in white weddings. Conductor Zubin Mehta is scheduled to visit in March. And L’Oreal plans to launch a fragrance, Oxygen, here because there is virtually no other smell to compete with.

“There’s something magical about snow,” said Candace Leonard, who drove from Albany, N.Y., with a friend to spend the night. “Sleeping in an igloo, under ice, is still a frontier to cross.”

Jacques Desbois, the hotel’s chief executive and a former igloo builder, visited Sweden three times to learn the “snow-how” of making a reliable structure from ice and snow.

From the outside, the hotel looks like a series of frozen bunkers. The structure is based on the vault--the same rounded ceilings and curved walls used in cathedrals, bridges and, yes, igloos. Snow is sprayed onto metal frames to form walls, which are then moved into place on skis. Construction took nearly five weeks and required 4,500 tons of snow and 250 tons of ice, Desbois said, adding that the hotel conforms to Canada’s building safety code.

Next year, Desbois plans to build a larger hotel at a nearby resort, where 95 guests will be able to ski, dog-sled and skate during the day.

Farley was recently on assignment in Canada.