Ice Hotels

The igloos here are set on a hillside above Levi, angled so that each glass roof faces north and away from its neighbours. That siting matters more than the glass itself: the units are spaced and turned to keep other people's lights and other people's windows out of the frame.

Inside, each igloo is a small hotel room in the ordinary sense — a proper bed that can be raised to face the sky, a bathroom, heating and a kettle — with the difference that the ceiling is transparent and heated to stay clear of snow. Dinner is served in a restaurant at the top of the hill rather than in the units.

The season runs through the dark months, and the resort's activity desk handles the usual programme of husky and snowmobile trips. Most guests come for one or two nights as part of a longer stay in the ski village below, which is a sensible way to buy this kind of room.

Northern Lights Village is arranged as a small settlement of detached cabins on a slope outside Saariselkä, each with a glass-panelled sleeping end and a solid, insulated other end holding the bathroom and the entrance. It is a more domestic arrangement than a row of igloos, and the cabins feel like small houses on a lane.

The site includes a restaurant that runs a set evening menu, which is practical in a place where the nearest alternative involves a drive in the dark, and an activity operation that fills the short daylight hours. Guests are given warm outer clothing for the excursions rather than being expected to arrive equipped.

It closes outside the winter season, and the whole operation is built around that fact — staffing, heating and the sightlines all assume snow on the ground and a long night overhead.

Close to Rovaniemi but far enough out to escape the town's light, Nova Skyland offers cabins and glass-roofed rooms on a wooded plot, with the emphasis on quiet rather than on scale. It is a small operation, and guests notice that in the way the staff work — fewer people, more of them recognising you by the second morning.

Rooms range from ordinary heated cabins to units where the sleeping area sits under a curved transparent shell. The hotel is upfront that the first kind is warmer and the second kind is the reason most people booked, and it does not pretend the difference away.

Because Rovaniemi has an airport with direct winter connections, this is one of the easier northern properties to reach on a short trip, and a fair number of guests use it as a single night at the end of a longer Lapland itinerary.

The bubbles are transparent inflated domes pitched in private woodland at secret coordinates given to guests on booking, and the design is deliberately minimal: a bed, heating, a lamp, and a shell you can see the whole sky through. Bathrooms and showers are in a service building a short walk away.

That walk in the cold is the honest cost of the concept, and the operation says as much in its own material. In return, the sites are genuinely dark, genuinely quiet, and unencumbered by the hotel architecture that usually gets between a guest and the sky.

Iceland's weather makes any promise about the aurora meaningless, and the hotel does not make one. What it sells is a night spent outdoors without a tent, in a part of the country where the nearest street light is a long way off.