Swedish Lapland
Where the river becomes the ground in winter.
Harads is a village of six hundred on the Lule River, which comes down from the mountains on the Norwegian border and here moves broad and slow towards the south. An hour north of Luleå, just below the Arctic Circle. In winter the river freezes, the sun shows for four hours, and at night the northern lights stand over the pines.
That two of Scandinavia's best-known hotels stand here is neither coincidence nor planning. Kent Lindvall built the Treehotel in 2010 because a friend had made a film about a treehouse. Ten years later came Arctic Bath, a ring of timber on the river that freezes into the ice in winter.
Both houses are architecture, but the reason you come is the other thing: the cold, the silence, the light.
Lapland isn't a journey. It's a condition you endure for four days and then miss.
We send people to Harads who don't want to survive winter but experience it. Treehotel: treehouses by Scandinavian architects, each its own idea — the mirror cube, the UFO, the bird's nest. Arctic Bath: sauna and ice bath on the river, cabins on the bank, each with a window facing up. Both within walking distance, both conceived by the same family. Come in January or February. In December it's dark; in March it becomes day. Book the four-degree ice bath before you think about it.
