2015/16 Ice Hotel details revealed

Oliver

We are very excited about the 2015/16 season at Sweden’s famous Ice Hotel and we can bring you the news of what you can expect.

Each year, highly skilled ice artists from around the world submit their designs for the Ice Hotel to choose from. When I visited last year for my holiday to the Ice Hotel in Sweden I was overwhelmed by the amazingly creative way the artists had created the unique art suites. They are all VERY different, using shape, light and inspiration from a wide range of courses including music, wildlife, history and art.

For the 2015/16 season Sweden’s Ice Hotel will create 19 hand-crafted art suites, each individually themed. The Ice Hotel received 130 submissions back in April 2015 for designs and had to choose just 19 from an array of amazing designs.

While the images of the art suites at the Ice Hotel are kept under wraps until they are revealed later in the year, you can read about 18 of them them below…

To plan and book your holiday to Sweden’s famous Ice Hotel call one of our Ice Hotel experts on 01543 258 631 or email vip@rbcollection.com. Our team have visited themselves and are on-hand to use their award-winning service to create your trip of a lifetime!

1) Elephant in the Room, AnnaSofia Mååg

Aptly named Elephant in the Room is the upcoming suite by sculptor AnnaSofia Mååg (SE), who created the unicorn for the main hall in 2014, and will feature a four metre tall African elephant overlooking the ice-framed bed.

2) Hibernate, Wouter Biegelaar and Viktor Tsarski

Ice Hotel old-timers Viktor Tsarski (BG) and Wouter Biegelaar (NL) are set to create a room appearing to be an old country manor drawing room, draped in fabric as the family has left for the season.

Among their previous work with us is last year’s Ice Bar, and luxury suite Mini Evolution in 2014.

3) Under the Arctic Skin – Rob Harding and Timsam Harding

Father-son duo Rob and Timsam Harding from Spain will make a Mediterranean interpretation of the Arctic, inspired by the way living in a cold climate affects your day-to-day life.

4) Counting Sheep – Luca Roncoroni

This will be Luca Roncoroni’s (IT) first experience of Ice Hotel, as he is set to create a comforting haven for those a bit anxious to spend a night in sub-zero degrees – they can count sheep till they fall asleep.

5) The Childhood – Ivan Loktyukhin and Vladim Polim

This Russian duo sent in no less than six different suite ideas, and their satirical children’s nursery turned out the winning ticket. The suite will have circular bed at the center of the room, with a giant toy rabbit at the far end and a floor-to-ceiling on the opposite side.

6) The Flying Buttress – AnnaKatrin Kraus and Hans Aescht

Sacramento-born, Humboldt State University graduate AnnaKatrin Kraus (USA/DE) and her European peer Hans Aescht (DE) designed The Flying Buttress inspired by the hotel’s iconic catenary ceiling arch. Their plan is to create a forest of Gothic-like ice pillars, cocooning the suite and transforming it into an intimate ice cave.

7) The Power of Love – Sebastian Scheller and Kristina Möckel

Sebastian Scheller and Kristina Möckel (DE) will participate with their idea, The Power of Love. The suite is ‘the machine room’ of love, as they explain it, with enormous ice pipes and a love barometer that capture the energy in the room and transform it to visions and fantasies.

8) Fractus – Anja Kilian and Wolfgang A Lüchow

Physics has inspired Anja Kilian and Wolfgang A Lüchow’s (DE) suite of molecules and fractals, creating sharp angular shapes in the room. Together with Sebastian Scheller the trio made one of last year’s most popular suites also inspired by the topic of science, the suite was divided by several frames, each tilting against the former by 7.5 degrees.

10) X,Y & Z – Anna Baumgarte and Liubov Moskvina

X,Y & Z by Anna Baumgarte and Liubov Moskvina (DE) interprets the relation between time, space and our experience as a way of imagining places we’ve never seen.

10) Live Your Time – Jose Carlos Cabello Millán and Javier Alvaro Colombo Matassa

Also drawing on the concept of time is the suite Live Your Time by Jose Carlos Cabello Millán and Javier Alvaro Colombo Matassa’s (ES). Cabello Millán has made several suites at Ice Hotel and the common thread is his flair for translating love and life into monumental abstract sculptures.

11) Cairn Forest – Annie Hanauer and Matt Chan

Annie Hanauer (USA/UK) and Matt Chan (UK) crafted the idea for their suite from cairns, or ducks as you may know them. Used in open space areas to mark a hiking trail, Hanauer and Chan have adopted their symbolic meaning as signs of a destination, goodwill and community between strangers. Their suite design takes the shape of a cairn forest, with ice slabs stacked together, floor to ceiling, forming towers and arches in an icy landscape.

12) Momo’s – Lotta Lampa and Julia Gamborg Nielsen

Drawing inspiration from cultural classics, Lotta Lampa and Julia Gamborg Nielsen (SE) make a fairytale suite derived from Michael Ende’s novel Momo and a comment to the stressful day-to-day lives that we lead today.

13) Cesare’s Wake – Petros Dermatas and Ellie Souti.

Cesare’s Awake is an adoption of the 1920s horror cult film Dr Caligari’s Cabinet by Petros Dermatas and Ellie Souti (GR).

14) Eye Suite – Nicolas Triboulot and Cédric Alizard

Nicolas Triboulot (FR) stayed at Ice Hotel 13 years ago and has dreamed of returning ever since. He and Cédric Alizard (FR) will craft a room with a myriad of crystal-like, sharp-cut angles, inspired by his favorite material, crystal and the sparkling, pure characteristics it shares with ice.

15) Don’t Say Don’t Cry – Petri Tuominen and Gaby Bulin

Not all tears ar sad. Tears can come from joy, relief or even an eruption or release of pressure that causes rain and snow. Tears are the theme of Petri Tuominen and Gaby Bulin’s (SE) suite.

16) The Labyrinth Saga – Clara Lindencrona and Kristin Borg

The suite Labyrinth Saga is an imperial theatre set, as if straight out of a tsar’s 19th century Russia. As you enter the room, you are transported deeper and deeper through the wings of a mystical scenery, carved from enormous blocks of ice and snow.

17) Love Capsule – Luc Voisin and Mathieu Brison

Luc Voisin and Mathieu Brison (FR) take the best (or worst?) of iconic 1970s fashion, design and disco lifestyle, fusing into one groovy sleeping experience.

18) Rhythm of the Arctic – luxury suite – Shingo Saito and Natsuki Saito

Boreal forest, aurora, ice, snow. Noble and strong expressions, but at the same time delicate and ephemeral. The luxury suite’s design picks up its essence from the Arctic nature.

Images shown are of art suites at the Ice Hotel from previous seasons.

To plan and book your holiday to Sweden’s famous Ice Hotel, call one of our Ice Hotel experts on 01543 258 631 or email vip@rbcollection.com. Our team have visited themselves and are on-hand to use their award-winning service to create your trip of a lifetime!

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The purpose of this review isn't to confirm that our holiday was a 5 star experience (which it was, by the way) but it's a review to say that RB Collection's involvement in planning, booking and safety netting our holiday experiences has been truly 5 stars. Are people bothered if my wife and I had a great holiday - I suspect no...... Are people interested in the company that was instrumental in creating 5 star holidays - I suspect yes ......and so it's RB Collection's skills and involvement that get this 5 star rating. As a family we have booked our own holidays almost exclusively by ourselves for 35 years - until a year ago when we used RB Collection's services for the first time to book a holiday to the Ice Hotel in Sweden. We chose to book through them because we had no experience or knowledge of the Ice Hotel and their exclusive Ice Hotel Website was great. Their involvement made all the difference - in particular their personal commitment to making things work and since the first contact, they have been getting to know our travel "needs, wants and likes" more by each contact. Our next holiday was a Silversea Cruise - one that we could easily have booked ourselves, but RB's influence allowed us to save a significant (4 figure!) sum. Reason alone to recommend! Our third and most recent booking with RB was a safari which could not have been a better holiday experience. The reasons for this are as follows: 1. Up until raising the possibility, I knew nothing about safaris i.e. where to go / at what time of year / for how long etc. Within 72 hours of a discussion of a suggestion by me for a Tanzania trip (based on a google AI search), I was infinitely far better informed and after weighing up possibilities, we opted for a Kenyan trip to Amboselli and the Masai Mara. What a brilliant decision! 2. Whilst the travel options were perfect for our particular needs, RB's involvement to seamlessly arrange the multiple transfers on our journey came to the fore. This was particularly evident on coming back from Zanzibar (beach unwind) to Nairobi International, which would have presented a significant challenge had we opted for self booking, due to the (multiple) security & immigration stages. (Yes, of course - we would have negotiated the stages - we're grown ups - we can look after ourselves, but oh my. the loss of wasted heartbeats would have been significant!) Turns out that what was arranged for us was faster than "fast track" and I certainly became aware of lots of people looking enviously towards us and our safari representative as we whizzed by! 3. Photography is an important aspect of our holidays. Good photographic subjects / scenes are our means of ensuring that we're seeing good stuff, which - IMHO - is a main focus of a holiday. Our safari guides had been well briefed about my photography wishes and from the get-go, they discussed what we were looking for from our holiday and so every day we had a mutually planned itinerary for the wildlife that never disappointed. Our guides had been particularly selected from the briefing given by RB pre-travel to the safari people. In a nutshell, RB have changed our attitude to holidays and their associated experiences. In our time with them, we have undertaken holidays that we have never done before and we are now definitely thinking differently about what to do in the future. Add to this, the reassurance and safety net that travel agency booking confers and I think that RB Collection definitely deserves a 5 star review. By the way - we live distant to their location - all of our dealings have been by telephone and email so don't think you need to be locals to use their services.

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