Take a modern, stylish boutique hotel. Then automate its check-in process. Then shrink down its rooms. Then place this hotel inside the terminal of a busy airport. What you’ll get as your result is Yotel—Spot Cool Stuff’s favorite chain of airport-only accommodations.
Airport hotels have got a bad name. You might have spent the night in a soulless concrete box by the tarmac, its hallways lined by hollow-eyed passengers en route to a better place. But it doesn’t have to be like that. The next time you’ve got a stopover between connecting flights, you can spend the night in heavenly comfort at one of these luxurious airport hotels. You might be tempted to book a room even if you aren’t using the airport!
The Villa Pisani maze is the world’s most difficult to solve. Napoleon himself is among those who have been flummoxed by it.
The world “mazerific” is thrown around a lot these days. But we’ve found eight mazes that really are superlative, either for their size, history or quirky features.
Check out our review below . . . and try not to get lost along the way.
If RuPaul operated a farm and Liberace an S&M palor the Crazy Bear Hotel would be like a cross between the two.
Sometimes it’s a fine line separating gaudy from opulent, and trashy from romantic. Straddling those lines is the Crazy Bear Hotel in Old Beaconsfield, England
What’s on the menu at London’s Inamo restaurant? Literally, your plate, your drinks and your silverware. At Inamo, patrons order their food electronically at the high-tech, interactive table at which they sit!
London is one of the most expensive travel cities in the world. It also has some great, affordable accommodations options on offer. Here’s a review of our three favorites. All three have both shared and private rooms. All three offer central locations and touches of luxury. And, with rates starting at £9 per person, all three are affordable to travelers looking for high value.
Shipping containers. You’ve seen them on trains, on the back of trucks, at ports and piled onto cargo ships. There more than 20 million of those steel 40 by 8 feet (12 by 2.4 meter) boxes scattered around the world. That’s more than were needed even before the current economic slowdown. Today, as many as one million shipping containers may be sitting around unused. The surplus is especially profound in the United States, northern Europe and China.
Given the planet’s excess of shipping containers and shortage of affordable housing it only makes sense that people would make the connection. “Container architecture” has become a specialty in itself. The benefits are obvious: Containers are relatively cheap (around US$1,200~1,500 each). They are, by definition, portable. And they are durable (made to survive rough treatment and resist salt corrosion). A container house can be built, on average, 40% faster than a comparably sized traditional house. And then there’s the environmental benefit of putting surplus containers to use instead of letting them slowly rust in a landfill.
Thousands buildings made of shipping containers are today being uses for offices, stores, restaurants and private residences. There are several excellent books documenting the most interesting among them. Here are five shipping container buildings we think are especially cool:
Imagine you had eccentric British relatives who lived in an enormous 18th-century London townhouse, who were veracious collectors of antiques, and who stuffed their house full of every painting, sculpture, mirror, book, armoire, clock, chest, candelabra, and exotic curio they ever obtained. The hypothetical townhouse you are imagining probably looks something like the very real Miller’s Residence. But you needn’t be a relative of the Miller’s to stay there. The Miller’s Residence is a hotel.
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