“You don’t have to copy things made elsewhere, it’s not interesting.”

So says Bertil Harström, the architect who worked alongside Johan Kauppi on Sweden’s latest innovative hotel.

“I think the interesting things come from your own history and your background.”

Called Arctic Bath, the hotel lies adrift in the middle of the Lule River, as if an island, in an area that is a “glacial haven of snow-tipped forests, world-class fishing, amazing wildlife and the Northern Lights,” explains CNN.

The team is also responsible for the area’s extremely popular Treehotel, situated amongst the forest canopy.

In a similar, but wetter manner, Arctic Bath will offer a mix of luxury and nature inspired by the wild, stunning Swedish surroundings.

The zany design is inspired by Swedish log-shipping traditions:

Until the mid-20th century, logs were transporting along Swedish waterways. En route, the timber would often get stuck on the rapids and form clusters of floating logs.

The architect recalled this image from his childhood – and it became his main inspiration for the new design.

“It was a symbol for that era,” Harström says. “So I chose to build this idea around the connection to the forest in the north.”

The resulting circular structure is a striking combination of man-made and natural influences:

“I don’t call myself a sophisticated intellectual architect designer, I work with more conceptual structures,” says Harström.

Once on the island, you can find six, 25-square-metre hotel rooms alongside saunas, a cold plunge pool, spa treatment rooms, a restaurant and bar and the central open-air bath.

Visitors will access the resort from a wooden walkway:

“You can say that the building is rather introvert, the focus is on the inside,” says Harström. “So if you see it from a distance, you will have some problems to guess what is inside.”

As you can see from the above image, during winter, the resort will be frozen into the ice. During the summer it’ll be floating in the river:

“It’s not a traditional façade in architecture,” says Harström. “I think TreeHotel prepared the world for ArcticBath as the next project.”

Keen? Arctic Bath is due to open in the latter half of 2018.

[source:cnn]