In addition to the twenty-one Art suites, this year’s ICEHOTEL has made ten Design suites in order to provide overnight visitors with yet another to choose from when selecting lodging at ICEHOTEL. Sami, Japanese, Arabic and Maori motifs were chosen for the debut year of Design suites.
Åke Larsson is the architect of ICEHOTEL. Åke is an experienced wood artist and furniture maker, and has recently been experimenting with cement and magnetite. Sofi Ruotsalainen is an artist who has been working with ICEHOTEL since 1999, shovelling snow, sculpting ice and designing suites. She is also an experienced river rafter and guide. Mikael Nille Nilsson is an artist, sculptor and designer and has been a part of the ICEHOTEL team since 1999. A former technician, he specializes in computer design, writing programs that are then used to create most of the CNC machine-tooled artwork for ICEHOTEL.