Treehotel

Lia found Treehotel the way she finds most of our best ideas, scrolling late at night with her feet in my lap, and she just turned the laptop toward me without a word. A mirrored cube hanging in a pine forest near a village called Harads, an hour or so from Luleå. I said the same thing I always say, which is “sure, but it’ll be booked out,” and it wasn’t, and three months later we were standing in the snow at dusk watching a rectangle of forest literally disappear into itself.

The property opened back in 2010, and what struck me once we were actually there is how each room feels designed by someone with a completely different obsession. We stayed in one from the first wave, one of the five rooms drawn up by studios like SandellSandberg and Cyrén & Cyrén, and Lia spent a good twenty minutes before dinner just walking around the exterior in her socks, boots in hand, trying to find the seam where the mirrors met the sky. I wanted to see the newer ones too, especially the Snøhetta room that architect Jenny Osuldsen hung ten meters above the ground, and the Dragonfly that Finnish architect Sami Rintala built later. We didn’t sleep in either, but we walked past both after breakfast, necks craned, feeling a bit like kids at an architecture museum that happened to also be a forest.

Dinner was the thing I keep bringing up months later. There’s a dining room suspended roughly ten meters up, and we climbed a narrow staircase in our socks carrying our boots, which felt absurd and completely right, to eat wild game and vegetables that had clearly come from somewhere close by, not flown in from anywhere. I had reindeer, Lia had something with root vegetables I’m still annoyed I didn’t order, and we kept losing the thread of conversation every time the wind moved the trees and the whole room seemed to sway a centimeter.

We were there in February, so the days were short and the Lule River nearby was frozen solid enough that our guide walked us out onto it, and at night the sky did that thing I still can’t describe properly to people who haven’t seen it, a green curtain moving very slowly like it was deciding whether to bother. We didn’t get to try the summer version, the kayaking and the fat biking under a sun that apparently never fully sets, but I’ve already told Lia we’re going back, if only to see the Mirrorcube in daylight instead of disappearing into the dark.

When to go: We went for the aurora and the snow, which means December through March, but Pierre-from-the-future keeps hearing that June to August brings the midnight sun and kayaking on the Lule River, so honestly there’s no wrong season here, just a different Treehotel.