The way we live now: Seriously cool

(GETTY IMAGES)

Here's a completely Conceptual interior. Artists get everywhere in interior designland now. You just can't stop them artisticising things, adding meaning and value to basic products as utilitarian as a breeze block. They bring allusions and references and playfulness and sub-texts meaning the owners of artist-designer things have more to talk about with their friends. And, of course, artist-designer things cost wildly more because buyers are speculating about their future value that isn't a tap, it's sculpture.

And the environment gets everywhere too. Designers can build in interest with a kite-mark (made with minimum impact/from sustainable materials/low energy use, etc), or an ecological side-effect. Environmental consciousness means some things feel more valuable and virtuous. Water and ice for instance. Now the ice is melting and there's the prospect of water wars, the white desert/ frozen wastes view of the ice-cap is reversing fast. Add to that the aching trend at the top end of the luxury business towards Purity, Simplicity et al (to show you're more evolved, responsible and fastidious than the oiks who want shiny houses full of show-off energy-wasting toys) and you've got a market gap.

So no wonder the Ice Hotel fascinates the artistically and environmentally sensitive. It's dead arty, the notion of a building that melts away and gets recreated every year. And, of course, the idea of crystal-clear ice made from the water of the River Torne in Sweden, just inside the Arctic Circle is Purity incarnate.

It all looks lovely, in a dippy way. There are exteriors and interiors built from ice, presumably on igloo principles. And ice-art, presumably drawing on the kitschy old novelty craft of ice-sculpture swans and so forth. And there's an ice-chapel too, a sort of reverse Las Vegas, a big sacred igloo with pointy windows, just the place for making vows.

The Ice Hotel is full of ice-art and design there's no limit to the domestic things they can make out of ice and no limit to the novelty because they have to remake it every year. People love shiny, glassy stuff, from American Deco furniture with Lucite (early transparent plastic) elements and those Modernist toughened-glass tables, or that smart, acrylic Sixties furniture through to the Philippe Starck Louis Ghost chair and the matching fancy lamps. The Ice Hotel look answers some deep-seated feelings and it's on-trend too.

Of course, it's a marketing-speak thing (but we like being marketed at by Swedes: we think they're doing it for our own good). But isn't this the loveliest hotel space you ever saw? Blue-white, transparent, simple and positively churchy it focuses you on Higher Things straightaway.

A highly skilled rendition of a chandelier: this really is an icy gallery for artistic types

The chairs and table are chunky and elemental, like something produced by the famous Swedish glass company Orrefors

Heroic columns: just one part of the look by High Concept marketers who thought up ways of reworking winter as an advantage

Snow is the smartest white shag-pile imaginable: no amount of money can buy this look

These elegant ice screens are simple yet luxurious – guaranteed by their impermanence to hold design kudos

For more details, see www.icehotel.com