Ice Hotels: four hotels

Iglu-Dorf builds several villages in the Alps, and this entry is about the Engelberg-Titlis site alone. Snow is packed into forms, the domes are hollowed out, and the sleeping chambers and the bar are carved once the shells hold. Through the season the same crew walks the village and repairs what the sun has softened.

The village stands on the mountain above Engelberg, on the snowfield below Titlis, and it is reached by the cable car that serves the ski area rather than by road. Guests leave the valley behind and finish the last stretch on foot. A common dome holds the bar and the tables, and the sleeping domes open off it.

Nothing here is permanent, so the building changes shape from one winter to the next. Doorways sit where the snow allowed them to sit. What was a corner last season may be a passage now, and by spring the whole village is gone again.

Crews shape the shells from packed snow before each season opens, hollow out the chambers, and finish the bar and the tables in the same material. This is a separate site on the Zugspitze glacier and not a second version of any other snow village in this guide. Guests go up together, in one group, with a guide.

Everything sits on the glacier below the summit of the Zugspitze, above Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and the way up is the mountain railway and the cable car rather than a road. The lodge is a cluster of joined snow rooms with a common space at the centre. Outside the door the ground is open glacier in every direction.

Arriving as a group changes the evening. Nobody drifts in alone, so the common room fills at once and empties at once, and the lodge behaves like a single room holding a single company rather than a house full of strangers.

Staff watch the sky through the dark months, and when it starts to glow they wake the guests who have asked to be woken. No promise comes with that. The light may appear, or cloud may hold across the whole night. What repeats here is the call and the watching behind it, never the sky itself.

The glass-roofed cabins stand on a slope at Levi, in Finnish Lapland, turned away from the lit parts of the resort. Each one is a room with a clear roof over the bed, so the sky is the first thing a guest sees on waking. Snow banks up around the glass as the winter goes on.

A hotel that wakes people runs backwards. Rooms that would be silent are suddenly in use, and the night becomes the part of the stay that everything is planned around, while daylight is left for sleeping and for the slopes.

Two habits run here, and they belong together. In the dark season guests are taken out to the aurora cabins away from the main house, and the following morning what was seen, or not seen, is gone through indoors over coffee. Neither part carries a promise about what the sky will do.

Nellim is a small village on the eastern shore of Lake Inari, close to the eastern border, and the hotel sits among pine and low ground. The aurora cabins stand apart from the main building, out where the lamps do not reach, each one glazed towards open sky, snow and the line of the trees.

The hotel is not one building but a distance between two. People leave the warm rooms on purpose and come back to them later, so the main house works as a place for returning to rather than a place to sit all evening.