Facing

Every entry starts from the same place. Stand in the room, or in the hall, and something is directly in front of you. A wall of salt. A cut face of tufa. A sheet of glass with a frozen lake behind it. A flat panel where a window would be in any other hotel.

That thing is not decoration added at the end. It is what the plan, the site and the material produced, and it is the one part of a hotel that cannot be changed by a refurbishment.

What you face stays with what is in view: surfaces, openings, the position of the bed, what is audible and what is not. It does not explain anything.

Why it is like that does the explaining, and only from the plan, the structure, the ground or the climate. Keeping the two apart is the whole method, and it is why the second block never repeats the first.

Three of the four capsule hotels here have no exterior wall, because they sit deep inside a terminal floor or inside a stack of prefabricated shells. That is a decision with a reason behind it, exactly as a window is a decision with a reason behind it.

We do not grade rooms, and no entry ranks one hotel against another. There are no scores on this site and there never will be.

Worth knowing is one line of preparation, not a complaint. Steep lanes, altitude, a cable car, a lift and a walk in snow: things worth arranging before you leave.

The line reading Sources read carries a month. That month is when we last read the published material behind the entry. It is not the date of a visit, and we publish no accounts of staying anywhere.

Published architectural writing, documentation the buildings themselves have released, and press coverage of openings and conversions. Where a name or an operator looked likely to have changed, we keep the entry to what we could still read.

What is not here: prices, star ratings, scores, room counts, floor areas, opening hours, booking of any kind, and paid placement. Nothing on this site can be bought, and a correction costs nothing. Two editors and a visiting proofreader have run it since 2023, without an office.

Four Canadian resorts are, as buildings, worth the same reading as the rest: an island pavilion converted from Expo 67, a resort cut into an escarpment, a low mass beside a lake, a plan built against a river channel.

The gaming floor is not described and not assessed. Where play is concerned this guide has nothing to add beyond the age rule and the helplines printed on that section.