Atkin's Architecture Group won first prize for an international design competition with this stunning entry. Set in a spectacular water filled quarry in Songjiang, China, the 400 bed resort hotel is uniquely constructed within the natural elements of the quarry. Underwater public areas and guest rooms add to the uniqueness, but the resort also boasts cafes, restaurants and sporting facilities.
Everland
Everland is a hotel with only one room, including a bathroom, a king-size bed and a lounge. What makes it so different is that -because it is also an art installation- this hotel travels! The Everland has been 'parked' in the most unusual places, like the roof-deck of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig, Germany, or the roof of Palais de Tokyo (with a spectacular view on the Eiffel Tower) in Paris.Considering how unique a night in this hotel is, the price is not so crazy: you can get the only room and the unique view for 333 Euros during the week, 444 Euros during the weekends.
Hotel de Glace
Made entirely of ice and snow, this unique one-story structure has been rebuilt each year since 2000. The 9th season of the Ice Hotel lasted from January 4th through March 29th 2009. The Ice Hotel has become an unparalleled and world-famous winter experience. It takes 5 weeks, 500 tons of ice, and 15,000 tons of snow to craft the Ice Hotel with its ceilings as high as 18 feet, walls covered with original artwork and furniture carved from ice blocks.
Stockholm is the house of this wacky hotel, the first aircraft inn. This abandoned Boeing 747 jumbo jet was saved from being trashed metal to become a 25-room hotel sited in Stockholm's Arlanda airport.
Each room is bare 65 square ft big and furnished with bunk beds, overhead luggage storage and flat-screen TVs. There is a reception area and a cafe with toilets and showers at the rear of the aircraft, which means that you will have to share! The upper deck is a conference room and the best of all, the cockpit is where the wedding suite is housed.
Not a very comfy hotel I would think, but staying there just to get a feel of it might be cool.
Picture this: a single suite, 155m underground in historic Sala Silvermine, one of the world's best preserved mine settings. During its heyday, production amounted to more than 3 tons of silver a year at Sala, and a total of more than 400 tons of silver and about 40,000 tons of lead were extracted - completely by hand!
If you wake up in the middle of the night and have to use the bathroom, make sure you turn right or else you'll end up exploring dark winding galleries, vast caverns and magic lakes.
The De Vrouwe van Stavoren Hotel in the Netherlands salvaged four wine casks from Switzerland and converted them into rooms. Formerly filled with 14,500 liters of Beaujolais wine from the French chateau, each now holds a modest two-person room with standard amenities and even an attached bathroom and a sitting room.
The one thing that might bother you, if you're not a wine enthusiast, is the smell of wine that the barrels still maintain. All in all the Barrel Hotel, in Stavoren, northern Netherlands, makes for a very pleasurable experience. General rates for a cask room are from 74-119 Euros a night with discounts of up to 75% off depending on season. If you go in the wintertime, a wine cask room can be as low as 18 Euros a night, cheaper than most hostels.
A hotel in Bolivia always has salt on its dining table – actually, its dining table is salt! Here's the strange Salt Hotel of the Uyuni Flats. The hotel was built in 1993 by a salt artisan who saw a mint in the number of tourists looking for places to stay while visiting the flats. The lodge has 15 bedrooms, a dining room, a living room and a bar. The building's roof and bar are built of salt and even the floor is covered with salt granules. The walls are made of salt blocks stuck together with a cement-like substance made of salt and water. During rainy seasons, the walls are strengthened with new blocks, while the owners ask the guests to avoid licking the walls to prevent deterioration.
In 1979, Japan built its first capsule hotel — an inn with rooms consisting of little more than a bed, and certainly not enough room to stand up. Now developers in Kyoto are contrasting that minimalist approach with luxury furnishings at the 9h Hotel, which opened in December 2009. It's called 9h because users are expected to shower, sleep for seven hours, and then rest in a nine-hour period — although you can rent your room for up to seventeen hours at a time. Each pod comes with customizable lighting to help lull you to sleep and then gently wake you up.
Billed as Europe's first hotel, Nhow Berlin, boasts a state-of-the-art recording studio and guitars on the room service menu. The interior's surreal setting, designed by Karim Rashid, is combined with the seemingly physics-defying architecture. This setting serves as the perfect catalyst for late-night jam sessions and impromptu DJ sets. Rashid brings a whimsy that turns the hotel into what can be best described as an amusement park for lovers of glossy, hyper design. This aesthetic is reflected down to the color of the rooms, neon furniture throughout the common areas, and wallpaper and carpet patterns that clash in a stimulating way.
If you're the sort of guy who slept on a car-shaped bed when you were a little kid and loved it, perhaps this is the hotel for you: the V8 Hotel, a car-themed hotel in Stuttgard, Germany. The hotel promises to give you the night – and the ride – of your life. The V8 Hotel boasts rooms guaranteed to rev the engine of any car lover – because the beds and rooms are made from their favorite vehicles. Based in the centre of Stuttgart's Meilenwerk – a German international hub for car dealers – guests can sleep in everything from a Morris Minor to a Mercedes.
Delft studio WAM Architecten have completed a hotel that looks like a pile of houses in Zaandam, the Netherlands. Called Inntel hotel, the building features overlapping green wooden façades typical of traditional houses in the region. The 11-storey building is forty metres tall and includes 160 rooms.
The new Inntel hotel in Zaandam is without a shadow of a doubt already the main eye-stopper in the revamped town centre and a building that has set many tongues wagging in the Netherlands.
