Reading the Plan

We look at crossings because they are the part of a stay you cannot choose after arrival. Style, age and material are worth writing about elsewhere; they change how a room looks, not how many times you stand beside a stranger. A plan settles that in advance, and it keeps settling it every day the building is open.

WHERE PATHS CROSS holds the spaces a guest cannot avoid: the entrance, the stair, the lift lobby, the courtyard, the one heated room, the concourse that links everything else. If a route can be taken only one way, it belongs there. So does a room that carries several purposes at once, because that is what concentrates people.

WHERE THEY DO NOT holds what the same plan does in the other direction: separate wings, second entrances, long corridors with few doors, levels reached by their own lift, buildings set apart on a large site. It is not the opposite of the first block and not a correction of it. Most hotels do both things, in different parts of the drawing.

Neither arrangement is the better hotel. A capsule hotel gathers people into one floor because the berths hold nothing else, and a lakeside resort spreads them out because the site is large. Both are answers to a brief. That is why there are no scores, stars, ranks or percentages anywhere on this site, and why we avoid words that would smuggle a judgement in.

TAKE CARE OF THIS is a line of preparation, not a complaint. Stairs cut in old stone, a road that ends at a mountain shelf, a sleeping bag on a snow bed: these are things worth knowing before you travel, and they are ordinary consequences of where a building stands.

The line that reads Last read names the month we last went through the published material behind a card. It is a statement about our reading, not about the hotel. Buildings are altered, operators change and rooms are renamed, so the month tells you how old our wording is.

The material comes from what hotels and their operators publish, from architectural descriptions of the buildings, and from press coverage. We write our own wording from it. We do not publish accounts of staying anywhere, and nothing on this site should be read as a report from a room.

There are no prices, no star ratings, no review scores, no booking of any kind, and no paid placements. We take no commission, sell no mentions and charge nothing for a correction. Two writers and a freelance editor have kept the guide by correspondence since 2021.

Casino Hotels are here because four large Canadian resorts are, in plan terms, among the clearest examples of a building that gathers and separates at the same time. We describe the concourse, the corridor, the lift bank and the road in. The gaming floor is not described and not assessed.

Capsule hotels are the extreme case of the shared plan. Removing everything from the sleeping place except the bed pushes washing, eating, waiting and storing luggage into rooms that belong to everybody. The result is a hotel where the shared floor is not an amenity but the working part of the building.