Chilled to perfection

SURE, IT'S FREEZING COLD IN SWEDEN'S ICEHOTEL BUT THERE'S ARTISTIC FLAIR BEHIND EVERY ROOM, FINDS MILO BOYD

- MILO BOYD

FOR some of the guests at the ICEHOTEL in the Swedish town of Jukkasjärvi, it isn’t the -10C bedroom temperature that causes them to abandon their £600 ice bed in the middle of the night, making a dash for the hard wooden slats of heated changing rooms.

It's the oppressive silence that comes with being in a room constructed entirely from snow packed on to ice foundations.

“If you didn’t know you had tinnitus before, you certainly will once you spend a night in here,” explained guide Glen as he ushered us into our icy room for the night, where an adult-sized ice baby peeked round the doorway - an unnerving sight.

For the past 36 years, architects, engineers and artists have descended on Jukkasjärvi on the outskirts of Kiruna to construct the latest iteration of the ice hotel.

The building process begins when massive blocks of ice are harvested from the Torne River. Each block weighs up to two tons and is stored during the summer, ready for the winter and the construction of the hotel in October.

And they are not there to build uniform, utilitarian ice rooms. Instead, they construct something between the fictional ice palace in James Bond’s Die Another Day and a fairground house of fun.

My wife and I were sleeping in one of 12 art suites - ours was called “There Is No One Here” and created by Turkish artists Ayla Turan and Kemal Tufan.

Five round-faced, jellybaby-like figures were in there with us, one standing guard at the door, another popping its head over the bedstead. A third seemed stuck in the wall, as if splinched by a Harry Potter apparition gone wrong.