About

Aro & Loom is an independent editorial index of sixteen hotels, grouped into four categories: art hotels, capsule hotels, casino hotels and ice hotels. It exists because those four kinds of building answer the same question — where do you sleep tonight — in four completely incompatible ways, and putting them side by side makes each one easier to see.

What we do

We write about buildings. Where a hotel stands, what it was before, how its rooms are put together, what a guest actually does between arriving and leaving. Each entry runs to a few paragraphs of prose and a short row of plain factual tags. We do not use specification tables, because a table flattens the one thing worth reporting about an unusual hotel: the reason it is unusual.

What we do not do

We do not take bookings, hold availability, quote prices or pass enquiries to hotels. We do not publish ratings, star counts, scores or reviews — our own or anyone else’s. We do not rank the sixteen entries against one another, and the order within a category carries no meaning.

The rosters

Four hotels sit in each category. The casino roster is fixed and does not change between editions. The other three are chosen by us and revised when a building closes, changes hands or changes character enough that the description stops being true.

Why the weave

The ribbons that frame every panel on this site are the whole idea in visual form. Two colours cross, one passes over and then under, and the result holds together precisely because neither dominates. Sixteen hotels, four categories, no single thread running the length of it.