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Celestial Guide

Celestial Guide

Eighteen hotels in four categories, described from public sources and revised by hand. The site sells nothing, ranks nothing and takes no bookings.

Illustrated cover artwork used by Celestial Guide

Capsule Hotels

Four houses where sleeping is arranged in berths or narrow cabins rather than rooms: Grids Tokyo Nihombashi East, Wise Owl Hostels River, easyHotel Sofia, YOTELAIR Paris Charles de Gaulle. Two of them sit in eastern Tokyo, one in central Sofia and one inside an airport terminal near Paris.

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Casino Hotels

Four Canadian resorts described here as hotels and nothing else: Montréal Casino & Hotel, Fallsview Casino Resort, River Rock Casino Resort, Casino Rama Resort. The pages cover their halls, restaurants, spas, theatres, golf and waterfronts, and leave the rest of each building aside.

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Ice Hotels

Four winter houses that stay standing all year: Borealis Basecamp, Blachford Lake Lodge, Hoshino Resorts KAI Alps, Zaborin. They are lodges, domes and hot-spring inns rather than buildings made of ice, and each is reached differently in the cold months.

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Art Hotels

Six hotels in buildings that had another life first: Círculo Mexicano, The Dolli at Acropolis, Vander Urbani Resort, Nolinski Venezia, Hotel Palacio de Villapanés, Casa Fantini Lake Time. A city house, a neoclassical villa, joined town houses, a former office block, a palace and a lakeside family house.

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By country

Bulgaria

Canada

France

Greece

Italy

Japan

Mexico

Slovenia

Spain

United States

Notes on method

Each entry begins with the hotel's own published material and is compared against maps and independent writing. Where a claim could not be supported, it was cut rather than softened. Nothing here is ordered, scored or recommended, and the four categories are simply groups of buildings that work in similar ways.

Chains complicate matters, because one name can cover many addresses. Where a house belongs to a group, the entry says so in its first lines and names the address plainly, so that a booking made elsewhere can be checked against it. Winter houses change with the season, and some of them close.

Pages are revised by hand and carry the month they were last read through. Corrections are welcome and are made without ceremony. The longer account of sources, limits and revisions sits on how the guide works, together with the way to report an error.