ICEHOTEL Sweden 2018: The Final Build Phase

A Rich Seam: The second week saw our room sign installed! This is always a really exciting moment for us! Our theme explores the idea of digging through snow in a mine to find a seam in the ice, then continuing digging to make new discoveries.

Ice delivery day! A tractor has just brought in two tonnes of ice for use in our room design. There are 6 pieces of ice per pallet, each weighing about 200kg.

Howard begins to cut up the pieces of ice with a chainsaw. It’s very heavy, slow work, and relies on having a very sharp chainsaw blade.

I love this image; it looks like a chainsaw in a fish tank. When we polish the ice, it’s clear as glass. But you also get these beautiful pockets of air bubbles and other things in there. These look like waves running through the solid ice.

The heavy work of sawing up the ice blocks. We often have to saw from both sides, so there’s a bit of clean-up needed before installing the ice in the walls.

Installing some of the heavier blocks is dangerous, as they are so heavy and slippery. So we used this brilliant lifting contraption to lift the biggest blocks in to place. This block weighed 150kg.

The snow cannons are running at ICEHOTEL, making a tiny wet ice crystal type of snow. This is perfect for casting the rooms, as it sets very hard.

To repair holes and imperfections in the snow (bits of gravel, dirt and ice), you have to prepare a special type of snow called ‘snice’. This loose, un-compacted snow is heated a little with a heat gun until it gets ‘sticky’. You can then use it a bit like Polyfilla, rubbing it into the hole and then we sand it off with sandpaper.

The chainsaws break quite often. They get clogged with ice and then freeze. The snow is also very abrasive on the blades, so you have to keep changing the blade. It’s not an easy job at the best of times, but when it’s -27c, your fingers don’t work so well. So the job can quite frustrating. This makes the reward of seeing the scheme come together even greater!

We wanted the ceiling of the ICEHOTEL room to look like carved stone, so we added this texture. Our room, “A Rich Seam”, is based on the way mines are dug out. So we wanted it to have a crafted, dug-out feel. It took a lot of testing to find the right mark, and this is what we ended up with. This part of the project was really successful, and a big hit with the other artists.

This is the completed ceiling, showing the ice carving.

This is the great hall at ICEHOTEL Sweden. It’s around 5-6 meters tall and over 100m in length. It’s a beautiful space, especially when the lighting was added to the columns. This is the route to our room each morning.

Casting another three hotel rooms at around 3pm. As you can imagine, it gets very cold when they spray all that wet snow around.

With all the hard work on the ICEHOTEL construction, it’s easy to forget what a magical, beautiful place this is. We have 4 hours of perpetual sunset each day, and the light is just gorgeous. The rest of the time it’s totally dark!

Testing the lights. Each room has a lighting designer, who works with us to get the lighting right. This is really important, as the snow is more reflective than a mirror – a small bit of light is all that’s needed, or everything looks white. We ended up using black electrical tape to just leave a tiny sliver of each LED bulb. Then a dimming filter was added to each light. We dimmed the whole arrangement to its lowest setting. This created a lovely atmosphere, but we decided to increase the number of lights, to make the seam of ice stand out more from the snow.

This is a hole we made in the ice seam, just inside the entrance to our designed room at the ICEHOTEL. We sanded and added frozen cubes to the hole, so it appeared like an organic but geometric growth of ice.

Finally there – on the last night, we slept in our completed ice room! This is a picture of me with my sleeping-bag in the foreground, looking out from the bed cave. It’s lovely to sleep in a cold room like that, there’s something very clean about the air.