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"Doors around the world": sustainable wooden doors for igloos

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Carpenter Dominik Neises (29) makes at least ten wooden doors for igloos between November and January. Not a safe job for the Bitburg-born carpenter, as outside temperatures of up to minus 20 degrees can cause not only tools but also fingers to "freeze" at his workplace. Neises works in the Arctic Circle, near Piteå, a small town in Swedish Lapland. Here, snow and ice are not only used as building materials for an igloo hotel with 21 snow houses, but also as materials for interior furnishings and design elements.

Incidentally, there are no traditional igloos in Lapland - but there has been an IGLOOTEL for seven years. All 21 igloos are connected by 250 metres of ice tunnel. This results in a total of 1,000 square metres of "livable" space. This means that guests don't have to go out into the Arctic cold if they don't want to and can reach the (permanently built) sanitary facilities safely and protected from the weather.

Watch out, this hotel is melting!

 

Reindeer skins, wooden doors and floors ensure a cosy atmosphere and warm feet inside. All the beds are on wooden platforms. In the end, around 35 cubic metres of wood are used in the snow hotel. But wait a minute: aren't cosiness and temperatures around freezing point mutually exclusive?

No, because despite the sub-zero temperatures outside, you can sleep comfortably inside at a "cosy" two degrees, dressed appropriately and in the right model of sleeping bag. The special igloo atmosphere, warm light, hot drinks and lots of wood ensure a cosy atmosphere inside. Nobody needs to freeze here. In addition to the ten sleeping igloos, there is a restaurant, an ice bar and a spa (which is even open-air).

Dominik Neises learnt how to build igloos professionally in Switzerland: "Snow is shot onto and over a large balloon and must then freeze through. The balloon is then removed," he reveals. The rest was "learning by doing". Today, the patented IGLOOTEL construction process ensures the safety and durability of the snow houses. The exotic hotel closes again at the end of March. Because that's when it starts to melt at the latest.

Person wearing a yellow cap in a workshop guiding a circular saw along a wooden board lying on a workbench; sawdust on the surface, blurred people and wooden parts in the background.

Craft design from Aachen, for a snow hotel in Lapland

Carpentry in Swedish Lapland: Dominik Neises builds sustainable customised wooden doors for the IGLOOTEL. (Photo: Dominik Neises/IGLOOTEL)

Students from the Akademie für Handwerksdesign Gut Rosenberg near Aachen were in Lapland for the sixth time. As part of their studies, the budding designers were not only allowed to plan the interior design of the hotel, but also to realise it themselves in the far north: as an overall design concept made of snow and ice with graphic elements, installations, projections and light art.

Three years ago, Dominik Neises himself travelled to Lapland for the first time as a student at the Aachen Design Academy. "It was so much fun because it was both practical and exotic," he recalls. To this day, he experiences the intensive working time in Lapland "more like a holiday".

Customised for the igloo: first the wooden door, then the door opening.

If you want to make yourself cosy in your sleeping igloo, simply close the door. Doors in the igloo? Yes, because international guests want privacy. Dominik Neises therefore installs wooden doors made from local pine and larch wood.

The speciality: First the unique door is created, then the oval door opening is customised from snow. There is no DIN or other standard for these handmade, one-off doors. Until now, the wooden doors of the Schlafiglus were made from normal boards and held in place by rag hinges.

But when it gets warmer outside, the snow houses settle and the walls sag. The snow then presses heavier on the wooden doors and the ceilings sink up to 40 centimetres. As a result, the doors always had to be sanded down after a few weeks. As a result, they could no longer be used as doors the next winter.

Man in black cap, grey-black jacket and yellow trousers stands in an unpainted, rectangular wooden door frame and holds the sides of the frame; in the background white, curved wall, red light and partially visible second person; wooden panelling around the opening, remnants of snow on the floor and a toolbox on the right
A person in a functional jacket and yellow trousers stands in a wood-panelled door frame and holds a partially open, light-coloured wooden door; the floor and threshold are covered in snow.
Person kneeling on wooden floor with snow residue, wearing yellow winter trousers and dark jacket, operating a red and black cordless screwdriver and fixing a wooden door frame to the right-hand wall.
Person in black jacket and yellow work trousers fixes a wooden door made of vertical slats with a cordless drill; three transverse metal hinge rods visible. Room with white, curved ice/snow wall on the left, wooden panelling on the right and wooden floor with remnants of snow.
Person kneeling on a snow-covered wooden floor and using a cordless screwdriver to screw a metal strut to the lower edge of a wooden door made of vertical wooden boards; wooden panelling on the right, a hammer lying on the floor.
Arched snow tunnel with rectangular wooden frame and plank floor; snow remains on the floor; passageway into a dark interior in which two trestle-like frames stand.

Regional wood, sustainable doors

"For the 2020 season, I thought about how we could become more sustainable and at the same time have as little work as possible with the doors during ongoing hotel operations," said Dominik Neises in December 2019. The solution: a new wooden surround frame now has five millimetres of "play" to the wooden partition wall and is screwed into vertical slotted holes. This allows the wall in the door frame to slide downwards and yet everything remains functional and secure. The new, sustainable doors look similar to standard doors.

Fire in the igloo hotel? Strict fire protection regulations also apply here. That's why its doors have to prove that they are watertight. If a fire were to break out, smoke development would be the greatest danger. These reliable doors must protect against this throughout the season.

2020: Doors of the igloo hotel remain closed

The research for this article began in November 2019, then January 2020 arrived and it suddenly became clear: for the first time in its history, the IGLOOTEL would not be able to open in the "darn 7th year". This is because the weather is throwing a spanner in the works for the snow builders. Until the beginning of January, it was simply too mild to build stable snow houses. The wooden doors are already finished and ready for installation. "They will be installed in the same way in 2021," plans Dominik Neises. Provided there is enough snow and it stays around freezing point.

 

Igloos: living in snow and ice

An igloo is a temporary home made of snow and ice. Traditionally, the indigenous people of the Arctic, the "Inuit" (or "Eskimos"), build this temporary shelter. As a people of hunters, they often follow their prey for weeks at a time, travelling several days away from their permanent home. During the hunt, they build an igloo to live and sleep in while travelling.

Incidentally, traditional igloos have no doors. Instead, the entrance is closed with a block of snow or ice to protect them from polar bears and the cold. Inuit still live in Greenland and Canada today.

Entrance to an igloo hotel with IGLOOTEL lettering carved in snow, blue-violet façade lighting, warmly illuminated doorway, raised platform and green aurora borealis in the night sky
Orange-coloured dome-shaped buildings on snow-covered ground; two snowploughs hurl arcs of blowing snow at night, scene illuminated by spotlights
Snow-clearing vehicle with running blower throws a wide swirl of snow at night; in the background several orange-coloured, dome-shaped shelters, piles of snow piled up in the foreground.

Overall design concept with light installations, sculptures ... and local woods: wooden doors in the igloo ensure cosiness and privacy inside. (Photo: Dominik Neises/IGLOOTEL)

Cold but cosy: have you ever spent the night in an igloo?

Sustained sub-zero temperatures and lots of snow are rare in large parts of Germany. But that is precisely why more and more people in this country are longing for it.

Is it any wonder that igloos are in vogue? Both as unusual hotel accommodation in the German Alps, in Switzerland or Austria, as well as for self-build: as a workshop for "professionals", a professional team experience or ice-cold leisure fun.

For example, a Swiss igloo association invites "professional igloo builders" to build an igloo village near Davos in the canton of Graubünden every year. Prerequisites: Igloo building experience and fitness for at least six hours of hard, physical labour. Several hundred igloo builders have responded to the call in recent winters and built a "Yeti village" of 30 igloos.

If you don't want to travel that far or don't have professional aspirations, you can even test your talents with the weather-dependent building material in Germany: in Oberwiesenthal in Saxony or in the Black Forest. There, families with children or companies can dedicate a few days to building such snow houses and even live in them. For example, at the "Igloo building" workshop with overnight stay and breakfast in an icy temporary home. Even with hot meals and a sauna on request!

Link list: Sustainable wooden doors for igloo hotel