Unusual Hotels

Our Favorite Room Themes at the Landhotel Hof Beverland

Spot Cool Stuff likes unusual hotels with creative themes. So, of course, we love the Landhotel Hof Beverland.

The Beverland (very much not to be confused with Bieberland) is located on the site of a former dairy farm near Ostbevern in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It has 62 rooms. And 36 radically different room theme.

There’s are the under-the-sea rooms, for example, and the medieval themed rooms. The hotel’s jungle rooms have beds suspended from the ceiling. Their Star Wars rooms have private cinema screening areas. Their disco rooms come complete with hanging disco balls and blaring 70s music.

None of those rooms, however, made our list of our top five favorite room themes at the Landhotel Hof Beverland. Which rooms did make the cut? Read on:

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The Treehouse is the Point

Staying here is a curious mix of luxury and roughing it

Seattle is a Spot Cool Stuff favorite city. We love experiencing its vibrant urban heart. And we love how easy it is to escape that for the accessible natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest.

A case in point (literally, a “point”) is The Treehouse Point. The complex—part treehouse hotel, part quaint event venue, part wilderness preserve—is in the middle of a lush forest yet only a 35-minute drive from downtown Seattle’s famed Pike Place Market.

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Glamping in Switzerland’s PodHotel

High snows. Cold temperatures. Brutal winds. Camping at altitude in the Alps during the winter is for the hard core. But going glamping — glamorous camping — needn’t be.

Travel in the Alps offers many opportunities to experience the rugged charm and back-to-nature feeling of staying in a tent without, you know, having to stay in a tent. Spot Cool Stuff readers might remember our review of the disappearing-and-then-reappearing Whitepods ski resort or our post about the boutique hiking hut at the base of the Matterhorn. To those we now add the PodHotel Flims — though the “hotel” in the name is a serious misnomer.

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The Crazy-Cool Treehouse-Like Hotels of Huilo-Huilo

Like staying in a CGI scene from Avatar come to life

The Huilo-Huilo Biological Reserve in the Andes Mountains of Chile is one of Spot Cool Stuff’s favorite travel destinations in all of South America.

Next month we’ll be publishing a review of the reserve itself — follow us on Twitter, join us on Facebook and return to our travel review blog for that.

In the meantime, here’s our look at two of the unusual, and amazing, places to stay within the reserve: The Hotel La Montaña Mágica and the Nothofagus Hotel & Spa.

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A Tale of Two Hotel Room Halves

Inside the Au Vieux Panier Hotel in Marseille, France there’s a guest room that, if it doesn’t have the world’s most unusual design, certainly has the most schizophrenic.

The room, referred to as The Panic Room, is half bone white — white bed sheets, white carpet, white walls, white furniture. The other half of the room is entirely decorated in bright graffiti — graffitied bed sheets, graffitied carpet, graffitied walls, graffitied furniture.

The dividing line between the two halves, it is as stark as can be, bisecting the room’s mirror, dresser and even the bed!

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Indoor Caravan Camping

When you visit Berlin will you stay in an artsy boutique hotel? In a low cost hostel? In a trailer park?

The wonderfully cool thing about The Hüttenpalast is that the accommodations are all three of those—at once!

At Spot Cool Stuff we’ve reviewed more than our share of unusual hotels. But rarely have we found one that offers such an unconventional experience with such a relatively high level of comfort at such a relatively low price.

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Cappadocia’s Cave Hotels

Cappadocia is one of the coolest, and most fascinating, travel destinations in Turkey. Up until two million years ago the region was literally a sea of lava over 150 meters (500 feet) deep. After the volcanoes that surround Cappadocia stopped erupting that sea of lava turned to rock—relatively soft rock that’s easily eroded and dug into. As a result the region is today rife with otherworldly rock formations, underground cities . . . and cave hotels.

There are maybe two dozen cave hotels in the greater Cappadocia region. A review of some of our favorites for budget travelers and for luxury-seekers.

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Overnight Inside a Giant Beagle

At this affordable bed and breakfast, paying the bill is not a bitch

Getting sent to the doghouse can be a very good thing if you happen to be traveling through central Idaho. Because there, on a rise on the outskirts of the town of Cottonwood, is where you’ll find the Dog Bark Park Inn, an unusual bed and breakfast that’s shaped like an enormous beagle!

The gregarious proprietors of the Dog Bark Park, Dennis Sullivan and Frances Conklin, describe their property as “a noble and absurd undertaking.” That sounds exactly right to us.

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