What is left out, and why we start there

This guide reads hotels backwards. Instead of listing what a building offers, it asks what the building was designed to do without, and then follows that decision through the plan. Two of us have kept the guide since 2017, working from two different countries, and we bring a photographer in for a particular shoot rather than keeping one on the guide.

An absence by design is not a shortfall

There is a difference between a hotel that has no window because the room is a sealed sleeping module, and a hotel where a window happens to be small. The first is a decision that the whole plan answers to. The second is a detail of a particular room. Only the first kind is published here.

We do not publish complaints. If a building is short of something in the ordinary sense of service, that is not our subject and it does not appear in these entries. Every absence you read on this guide is one the building was built around, and it is taken from published sources rather than from our own disappointment.

What goes into the three parts

Part I says what the building does without, in plain terms: the thing itself, and how far the decision reaches. Part II says what occupies that place instead, which is usually a structure, a habit of the house, or another room doing double work. Part III says where the absence becomes noticeable to somebody standing there, and at what moment.

See to this

Each entry ends with one line of preparation. It exists because a building that leaves something out asks the guest to bring or arrange something in return: a torch, an alarm, dry clothes, a decision about how to arrive. The line is practical and it is not a criticism of the hotel. Reading it before you go is the point of it.

Source check

The month printed at the foot of an entry is the month we last read the published sources behind it. Buildings are renamed, operators change, seasonal hotels are rebuilt to a new plan. The date tells you how old our reading is, so you can judge for yourself whether to look again before you travel.

Where the material comes from

Hotel websites, architectural and design publications, museum and civic material, and the operators’ own published descriptions. We describe all of it in our own words. We do not publish accounts of staying anywhere, and nothing on this guide should be read as a report of a night spent in any of these eighteen hotels.

What is never published here

No prices, no star ratings, no scores, no room counts, no opening times or schedules, no booking of any kind, and no paid placement. Nobody can buy an entry, buy a change to an entry, or buy their way out of one. We take no commission and we have no commercial relationship with any hotel described.

Why there is a section of casino hotels

Four of the eighteen are casino resorts in Canada, and they are here for the same reason as the rest: each one stands on a site that withholds something ordinary, an island instead of a block, a slope instead of a level plot, water instead of one road in, forest instead of a town. The gaming floor is not described, not counted and not judged anywhere on this guide.