An independent guide

Hotels, read through their materials.

Every hotel here is first a pile of materials. Before it is a style, a location or a place to sleep, a building is brick, timber, salt, stone, ice, glass, steel or concrete. This guide reads eighteen hotels in that order, and says what the choice does to the room you end up in.

An ornate hotel-ratings plaque in bronze, copper and jewel tones.
BRICKUnused in this fileBrick builds a wall out of small units, so the surface keeps a visible grid and a warm tone. TIMBER12 hotelsTimber arrives as boards and beams, so the frame stays visible and the surface ages in the open. SALT1 hotelSalt is cut into blocks and stacked dry, so the building belongs to the flat it stands on. STONE6 hotelsStone is heavy and usually local, so a building made of it repeats the geology of its own valley. ICE4 hotelsIce is cut, packed and stacked for a single season, so the building is rebuilt rather than repaired. GLASS16 hotelsGlass turns a wall into a view, and hands the room over to whatever the weather is doing outside. STEEL7 hotelsSteel carries load in thin members, so floors can be stacked close and openings kept wide. CONCRETE8 hotelsConcrete is poured in one piece against formwork, so the wall keeps the print of its mould.

Why materials

What a building is made of can be checked, described and compared. An opinion about atmosphere cannot. Material also explains most of what a guest actually notices: how warm a wall feels, how far sound travels, how much weather comes through the window, whether the place is repaired or rebuilt each year. So we start there, name three or four materials per hotel, and let the rest follow from them.

All eighteen

Sections

Art Hotels · Capsule Hotels · Casino Hotels · Ice Hotels

How the list is put together, and where the material descriptions come from, is set out in The Method.