Independent hotel guide
Lunentra
Eighteen hotels, four categories, and the same two questions asked about each one.
Lunentra is an independent reference to eighteen hotels, grouped into capsule hotels, ice hotels, art hotels and casino hotels. Every place on the list is open and can be visited. Nothing is sold here, nothing is booked, and no hotel pays for its place. The wording keeps to what public sources support.
Each entry opens with a paragraph on what the hotel is and where it stands, then answers two questions: what it is, and what is good to know before arriving. Three tags close the entry with the category, the city and country, and the month the entry was last read against its sources.
Capsule Hotels
Four houses where the sleeping unit is a cabin and everything else sits on a shared floor. The section covers a Tokyo address of a Japanese chain, a house built into bookshelves in Osaka, a compact-cabin hotel in Porto and a single-pattern house near the Barcelona exhibition grounds. Each entry names the chain and the address it belongs to.
Ice Hotels
Four winter sites on the northern Norwegian coast: an island of separate huts in Fleinvær, a lodge under the Lyngen Alps, cabins on the old quay walls of Manshausen and a shoreline resort on the Malangen fjord. Seasons change what stands and what is open, so each entry says what depends on the season.
Art Hotels
Six hotels set in older buildings, from a lakeside house on Como and a former convent in Nice to a Palma town palace, a Viennese corner house, a hospital site in São Paulo and a sandstone government building in Sydney. Each entry keeps to what the building was and how that plan is used now.
Casino Hotels
Four Canadian complexes covered as hotels and resorts: Expo pavilions on an island in Montréal, a building cut into the slope at Niagara Falls, a riverside site in Richmond and a resort at Rama in Ontario. Buildings, halls and grounds are described; the gaming floor is not.
How an entry is built
What the hotel is, where it stands, and whether it is one address of a chain or a separate site of an operator.
How the building and its shared rooms are arranged, and what stands around it, as far as public sources describe it.
Practical points worth settling in advance: what is seasonal, what is shared, and what belongs to the address rather than to the chain.
The category, the city and country, and the month and year the entry was last read against its sources.
Where these hotels stand
The eighteen are spread across nine countries. Japan, Portugal and Spain carry the capsule houses; Norway carries all four winter sites; Italy, France, Spain, Austria, Brazil and Australia carry the art hotels; and Canada carries the four casino hotels, in Québec, Ontario and British Columbia.