A night in the Icehotel, Jukkasjärvi

The Icehotel is less a building than a season made solid. Each winter, on the bank of the Torne River in Jukkasjarvi, north of Kiruna in Swedish Lapland, crews harvest ice from the frozen river and pack it with snow into a structure that is carved, inhabited and then, come spring, allowed to melt back into the water it came from. Nothing about it is permanent, and that is the source of its quiet strangeness: you are sleeping inside something that will not exist in July. The interiors are the work of artists invited from around the world, each given a suite to sculpt. Walls become reliefs, blocks become furniture, and light is set low and blue inside the ice so that the carving seems to glow from within. You walk the corridors in the evening the way you would a gallery, except the exhibits are also the bedrooms, and the whole thing is a few degrees below freezing whatever the weather does outside. Sleeping there is more expedition than indulgence, and the staff are honest about it. The cold rooms hold at around minus five, so you are briefed, handed an expedition-grade sleeping bag, and shown a bed of solid ice softened with reindeer hides. You sleep in a thermal base layer inside the bag, and in the morning someone arrives with a cup of warm lingonberry juice to wake you. A heated changing room, sauna and lockers sit close by for everything you cannot take onto the ice. Set expectations accordingly. One night on the ice is enough for most people, and many book a single cold night bookended by warm rooms elsewhere on site, which is the sensible way to do it. The reward is not comfort but novelty and craft: a drink in the ice bar from a glass carved of ice, the deep hush of the Torne valley, and — if the sky clears — the chance of the aurora overhead as you cross between the warm building and the cold one.