Sixteen hotels · four categories
Some hotels are worth reading about before you ever stay in one.
iGamePortal is a written index of sixteen properties, grouped into four kinds of building that each solve the same problem — where to spend the night — in an entirely different way. No ratings, no stars, no booking engine. Just descriptions of what these places actually are.
The index
Four categories, four entries each
Each category holds four hotels, described in prose rather than tabulated. Start wherever the idea interests you most.
Art Hotels
Four hotels where the collection is not decoration — a free public museum on the ground floor, a building devoted to one painter, several hundred works in a seafront tower, and a Swiss estate that hangs its corridors.
Read the four entries CapsuleCapsule Hotels
Four readings of the smallest useful room: an airport cabin, a Kyoto pod with a lounge attached, a Tokyo hotel with a real bathhouse, and a building run strictly to a nine-hour clock.
Read the four entries CasinoCasino Hotels
Four Canadian casino hotels, written up as hotels — an island built for a world's fair, an escarpment above a waterfall, a river frontage near an airport, and a lakeside site in cottage country.
Read the four entries IceIce Hotels
Four hotels carved from ice and packed snow, most of them rebuilt from nothing each winter and returned to the river or the sea when the season ends.
Read the four entriesHow the index works
Written, independent, and deliberately incomplete
Chosen for the idea
A hotel enters the index because its category is expressed clearly in the building itself — not because it is the largest, the newest or the best reviewed. Sixteen entries is the whole list, and it stays small on purpose.
Described, not scored
Every entry is prose: where the property stands, what the building is, what a guest encounters. There are no star ratings, no scores out of ten and no reviews, because a number tells you far less than a paragraph.
No bookings, ever
Nothing here is bookable and nothing is sold. The index takes no commission and arranges no stays; when you have decided where to go, you go to the hotel. Details change, so treat everything as a starting point.