I had one final room to make for the 2014 Iglu-Dorf hotel in Davos, Switzerland and it was the suite. It's the most expensive room in the building at around €700 a night and for that, you get a bed made of ice, an ensuite toilet and a jacuzzi.
This was my first time to make the suite and so I wanted it to be something special but with only 4 days to do everything I knew I would have to work my ass off.
The Suite was separated from the main hotel and was actually a complex of three igloos connected by a small corridor. The image above is of the Pistenbully gathering the snow to make it. If you have read my previous posts you will know that the temperature was pretty warm that year and the snow was a little thin on the ground.
As a little refresher on how they are made, they use these balloons as a form and then cover it with snow using a snow fighter. After a day or so they deflate the balloon and pull it out, leaving an empty space that becomes the room. The red balloon in the picture above is the corridor form.
For the main sculpture work, I made some figure skaters above the bed. I like the elegance of figure skating and thought it would add a little romance to the room. I went a bit crazy and made them quite 3 dimensional which meant I had to dig away a lot more snow. Luckily. this was quite useful as a material to fill the bed with.
They call it an ice bed even though in reality it is just a couple of blocks of ice that make the edge of the bed. I decided to give it a little movement and bring it around to form something that looked like a birds nest.
Because it was quite warm I didn't get to finish it as intended. I had cut all the ice I had let over into long bars and these were to be added to the bed to make it more intricate. Martijn would have to finish it when it got colder. I liked the composition and I am sure it would have been nice to wake up in.
There was a large space opposite the bed and I thought it would be nice to make a little seating area to have a drink and admire my amazing work ;). Trying to add to the romance of the room I formed this heart seat with a rose frozen within a block of ice.
Apparently, it went down very well and now every year we do something similar in the suite.
Running down the corridor to the toilet and jacuzzi I created a bit of texture on the walls. It was really just to accentuate the texture left by the ballons but I liked the effect it made.
This year there was also a really expensive sound system in the suite. I could not imagine spending €700 to sleep there but it became a very popular room and the whole igloo hotel seems to be booked out until it melts away in April of the next year. There seems to be a lot of people in the world with money to blow on this kind of experience. I have yet to sleep in an igloo myself. I spend 13 hour days making the damn thing and am more attracted to my bed in the ski lift station.
Like most years I left for home on the 24th of December, back to my pregnant wife who I am sure you can imagine missed me.
Ps
Thanks for reading. I use PeakD to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, amongst other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Hive Blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.
Iglu-Dorf History and Sport (Part 2/3) - snow sculpture
Iglu-Dorf History and Sport (Part 1/3) - snow sculpture
Grativity - sand sculpture
I hope you'll join me again soon
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I am also starting to create NFTs of my sculptures and welcome you to my gallery where you can own a bit of ephemeral sculpture history
[//]:# (!pinmapple 46.836429 lat 9.805028 long Iglu-Dorf History and Sport (Part 3/3) - snow sculpture 2014 d3scr)