Top 10 Weirdest Hotels From Around The World
Sleep by itself can be boring; that’s why when you “sleep with someone,” you never just sleep with
them. When you stay at a hotel, that’s really all you need, but it’s
never what you want (by itself anyway). You expect room service,
complimentary breakfast, and little soaps and shampoo bottles. You are
paying, in essence, for an experience that is restful more than just rest itself.
For some hotels, the “experience” isn’t limited to just feelings of
restfulness; try awe-struck, amused, bewildered, even frightened. These
hotels have uncapped new realms of possibilities, ones that demand
attention even if they don’t demand serious business. Here are ten
unusual hotels that will keep you up at night reassessing your
preconceptions about this so-called business of “restfulness”.
10. Dog Bark Park Inn
This bed and breakfast, located in Cottonwood, Idaho, is shaped like a beagle.
Owned by a pair of “chainsaw artists” who claim to have been able to
afford such an investment through the “fortune” they made selling wooden
dog carvings on QVC, this place is an obsessive dog-lover’s fantasy
come true. Every motif is dog related, from the muzzle you can make
yourself at home, to every little fixture and decoration. There’s even a
gift shop where the chainsaw artisans sell their little wooden dog
sculptures.
The creepiest part of all has to be the entrance to the B&B,
which is via a staircase that appears to enter the dog’s rear quarters.
But then again, that’s exactly where a dog goes whenever he meets
someone new. Interesting side note: their website doesn’t mention their
pet policy, as much as their dog-centric theme begs for one (or maybe
it’s just begging for a treat).
9. Safari Land Farm and Guest House
Located in India, in the middle of the Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary,
this resort offers lodging in the trees. Literally: you spend the night
in a tree house constructed around a hulking agricultural up-growth,
like the kind Dad builds in the backyard for his kids. Unlike the
shoddy Home Depot DIY project by which your Dad upheld his manliness, a
far-from-home, middle-of-a-jungle aesthetic really brings these lodges
to life. As do the various monkeys, elephants, and other native
creatures that happen to casually stroll and perch about. If you want
to truly feel like Mowgli on your next visit to the jungle, this is surely the place to hang up your loincloth.
8. Capsule Hotels
Ever wondered what it was like to be abducted by aliens, or at the
very least just to sleep on a UFO? Well, these mini-hotels, built from
oil rig survival pods, are the closest thing to such an encounter of the
third kind. Found in Den Haag, Netherlands, they rest upon water as
easily as they do on land and make lodging accommodations as amphibian
as the vessels from which they are derived. Only in a place where pot
brownies are as ubiquitous as paper napkins could someone feel at
complete ease stepping out of one of these to get the morning paper.
7. Drain Pipe Hotel
Like sleeping inside of a giant soda can, these drain
pipes-turned-luxury suites are the brainchildren of the Austrians, whose
architecture as wonky
as their modern art. How they don’t roll away in the middle of the
night must be credit to their weight, as these things boast the comfort
factor of solid concrete.
6. Alcatraz Hotel
If you’ve ever dreamed of sleeping inside of a German prison,
but lacked the criminal wherewithal, here’s your chance to do so
(although food and lodging in this case aren’t free). Granted, the
luxury factor is dramatically augmented, rooms looking like Ikea and
David Lynch teamed up to refurnish an upper-class-catering correctional
facility. The only real hints of prison life come with the crudely
spray-painted room numbers and wine bars/concierge desks/etc. which
resemble holding cells, solid vertical bars left intact.
Who would’ve thought a yuppie on international business would
willingly spend the night in a space once occupied by a homicidal
maniac? Even if a looming, dark uneasiness does hang about the history
of such an establishment, a former prison could never be as bad as a
college dormitory.
5. Jumbo Stay
Now sleeping on an airplane can be its singular function. In Sweden,
a hotel in the form of a converted jumbo jet exists, where passengers
(as it were) can sleep in private chambers and dine in a swanky-looking
lounge, all while parked at an airport with the spectacle of constant
arrivals and departures a calming (or perhaps unnerving) atmospheric
backdrop. Luxury class lodgers can even sleep in the cockpit albeit
sans (we hope) the ability to make inane, monotonous announcements at
regular intervals via the intercom.
4. Osaka Capsule Inn
In Japan, space is famously limited. Let these ideas of lofty luxury
be one more instance of that fact. The rooms resemble industry ovens,
wherein the roasts, err…residents can sleep peacefully, with an
interior control panel, which allows the resident to choose the
temperature he wishes to be cooked at. The image of these things evokes
something incredibly bleak and sci-fi, like this hotel is the very
source of the city’s power, harvested from “organic” energy sources,
sources that never check out on their own volition. Neat concept though
(better one for a movie).
3. Hotel de Glace
This hotel in Canada
is literally a giant igloo; constructed of thick layers of ice, the
only things heated are isolated bathrooms (and there are fireplaces in
the bedrooms). If you’re wondering how something like this could endure
the seasons, it can’t. It only lasts from the first week in January to
the last in March. The rooms are kept at subzero temperatures, you
sleep on a bed of ice, and if you don’t take advantage of the
arctic-strength sleeping bags, hypothermia is a very real possibility.
Sounds like fun! Pretty as it is, even with the number of weddings that
take place there, it really sounds more spectacular than practical.
2. Hobbit Motel
This is a real thing. No, your neighbors won’t be unusually short
and hairy-footed, but no one’s to stop you from eating six meals a day
in the Woodlyn Park main room. Otherwise, this so-called Hobbit Motel
is completely modeled with the Shire, hobbit hometown of J.R.R.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings book series, in mind. The doors
and windows are round, and the actual motel rooms are burrowed in the
bosoms of a bucolic hillside, but the fact that this particular motel is
located in New Zealand, where the movie franchise was filmed, has
“gimmick” written all over it. Also written: “tourists are suckers”.
1. Poseidon Undersea Resort
Underwater worlds like that of Atlantis, or the video game Bioshock, or even Star Wars Episode 1
are conjured by the notion of being able to walk, reside, and dwell
beneath the ocean. It seems like a utopian idea–or perhaps dystopian,
should the water provide the only remaining refuge in a world ruled by
hydrophobic robots/zombies/parasites/etc. But that escape can be a much milder one should you want to occupy a stationary submarine recreationally.
The Poseidon Undersea Resort offers this possibility. Located on a
private island in Fiji, stayers can see godly beings both terrifying and
gorgeous sweep across virtually every part of the hotel, as each
toe-shaped room features giant transparent fingernails. This sounds
like the perfect place for surface-resistant scuba-divers, but a little
scary for those who remember that scene in one of the Jaws
sequels where the shark crashes through that underwater corridor. But
that probably won’t happen; actually, the website lists the various ways
in which the Poseidon is “redundantly fail-safe,” although shark
resistance isn’t explicitly mentioned.
