Whether or not you grew up on the fairytale of The Snow Queen who captivates young Kai with her Nordic ice palace, you will easily fall under the enchanted spell of a winter wonderland of ice crystals like diamonds. Sweden’s biggest tourist attraction of the past decade is the Icehotel in Jukkasjarvi, where water borrowed from the river on its way from the mountains to the sea is worked by architects and designers to create and deliver a concept in ice living. Walls, beds, a theater, an ice church, an art center, and a bar must all be built between November and the start of the Icehotel season in December when temperatures plunge to 40˚ below zero, and the sun never reaches the horizon. Then, when summer comes, the hotel melts, only to be artfully redesigned and rebuilt as soon as the weather gods permit. Part of Sweden’s Icehotel is its Icebar, which has also grown over the years so that it is, this year, a hall inspired by the cathedral in Rheims, France, and it rests upon twenty pillars.
While it is not traditionally a festive food, water is the source and mainstay of life, and deserves celebration. So if it is not in the stars that you take the 90-minute flight from Stockholm to Jukkasjarvi’s Icehotel with its pillared Icebar, if you are in Stockholm you will want to visit its outpost, the world-famous Icebar Stockholm. It may not be the ultimate experience of the Icehotel, but it is altogether pure and unique and wonderful.
Not yet a year old when I visited in August, Icebar Stockholm had opened originally in 2002 and re-opened with festivity and fanfare as the Absolut Icebar in October 2003 in the Nordic Sea Hotel, close to pretty much everything. The collaboration between Icehotel and Sweden’s Absolut vodka will extend to very select, far-flung Absolut Icebar sites in the future.
Icebar Stockholm is open Monday to Friday from 4:30 pm until midnight and 3 pm until midnight on Saturday, but don’t expect it to operate like an ordinary bar. The price of 125 kronor (about $17) buys you an appointment for 45 minutes and an Absolut drink in an ice glass. For 75 kronor you can get refills – “until the ice glass melts,” laughed Sven at the bar, though I saw no evidence of meltdown. If you are late, someone will have taken your place, as the Icebar can hold only 30 people at a time. Adding more people would lower the internal temperatures, about which the Icebar is very protective.
Here, pure water from the Torneälv River in Lapland has been frozen to shimmering ice, so that the walls are ice, the standing tables are ice, the lamps are ice, the art is ice, the bar is ice, the square designer glasses with the round holes for your drink are ice, and the temperature is an icy but remarkably comfortable five degrees below zero.
Arrive at the Icebar early, and the excitement begins outside when you gaze in from the street or the huge lobby of the Nordic Sea Hotel. We could see people through the floor-to-ceiling glass, and we could all but touch the life-size ice sculpture of a cow -- part of the summer-long 2004 art exhibit of seventy exuberant and comical fiberglass cows in residence all over Stockholm’s streets. This one was sleek, sophisticated, transparent, and translucent, and those inside kept petting her. She will probably disappear when all the other designer cows are auctioned off this fall, but I think Icebar should buy Icecow – the world’s first cow made of natural ice from the Sweden’s Torneälv River – and keep her permanently as an “ice-breaker,” so to speak, for guests. Besides, there’s a drink named for her in the hotel. It’s called “Icecowtel,” and combines cow’s milk, marshmallow syrup, and Absolut Vodka.
In Icebar’s anteroom, where the terrific T-shirts say “Icebar” in white on white, the attendants check your belongings and then drape you in a giant silvery white thermal parka with a giant white fur hood and giant gloves. If you let them, they will even do the clasps for you, so that you feel once again like a child, bundled up and expectantly ready for the world beyond – only this is an interior fairyland.
To enter, you pass quickly through an airlock into the Icebar. Not only do you look like a piece of the landscape, but the parka is the great equalizer, rendering celebrities, the very rich, and all the rest of us – Bjorn, Anders, Inga, Ulrike, the businessmen, and the foreign tourists -- identical in dress. Warm footgear is also available, though Latin-American women typically arrive in stiletto-heeled shoes and slip and slide across the floor, intent on their fashion quotient. But because the Icebar is small, and the number of people inside strictly controlled, everyone connects at eye level, so shoes, someone should inform the Latins, are irrelevant.
The Swedes, of course, know how to dress their feet for the Icebar. When I visited Stockholm, it was late summer, the one week of the year when piles of expensive Swedish crawfish, or kraftör, are celebrated at the table with happily silly songs and sillier hats. But the week of festivities also signals summer’s end and the swift approach of winter; in a trendy boutique in Ostermalm, the winter socks were already out, of a heft and thickness that was hard to believe. Until a woman on one of the islands of the archipelago described to me how the waters of Lake Malaren freeze, and people walk across the expanses. And drive their Volvos across the frozen water. Vikings, remember?
An atmosphere of frosty pleasure and delight pervades the Stockholm Icebar, as if stepping into the small space were stepping into an adventure, or another galaxy, or a time warp. After all, humans weren’t around thousands of years ago for the Ice Age. Perhaps it is all that reflective surface, all that shimmer, all that luster. People’s eyes get brighter and their smiles more embracing. They are easy and friendly as they share a slightly surreal experience, becoming almost giddy as they sip Absolut vodka braced with the deep colors of blueberry or lingonberry or Absolut’s brand new wild and intense “Raspberri” from their ice glasses, combining sculpture and flavor for the ultimate cool.
Some of the men think it is also cool to hold their glasses in their bare hands and skip the gloves. Actually, it is less than cool; it is freezing. And the cool guys also need to be reminded that it is best to bring a business card to exchange phone numbers since ball point pens don’t work in sub-zero temperatures.
Sweden gave the world the Volvo, IKEA, Abba, and Absolut, and the next Swedish export will be the Icebar. The partnership between Absolut and Icehotel, begun in 1994, got international attention with the Absolut Versace campaign, photographed on location in Jukkasjärvi in 1997, with photos by Herb Ritts of models Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell in Versace designs inspired by the Absolut bottle itself.
While Icebar is still waiting for a thumbs up in New York City, in May 2004, Absolut Icebar opened in Milan, awakening the senses of the Milanese to the possibilities of water to enhance life. All the ice in this and any future Absolut Icebar will be imported from the Torneälv River because of its remarkable transparency and unmatchable beauty, derived from the pristine waters and from the high speed of the river’s flow during the freezing process. Absolut is also dedicated to Swedish purity of origin, and produces all of its vodka in Åhus, in southern Sweden.
My photographs from the Absolut Icebar reflect the drink-and-be-merry fun, but they cannot quite capture the sense that the swift and ineluctable forward movement of water is magically on hold, nor the seriousness of the purity of water and its power to transmute and transmogrify into ice, an ice that is crystal clear and strong, but not immutable. It is, finally, the indelible memory of the ethereal, ephemeral beauty of ice, brought to the guest in a spirit both playful and respectful, in the land of the midnight sun, that will not be erased.