We've had ice hotels, treehouse hotels and underwater hotels. There are even plans afoot for hotels in space. And now Travelodge have unveiled the container hotel.
The budget hotel chain's new hotel in Uxbridge, West London, is being constructed entirely of shipping container crates which are stacked and then bolted together. According to a company spokesman, this Womble-like reuse of the everyday things merchant seamen leave behind could cut 10% from the cost of each build. With the average build cost of a 100-bed hotel around £5m, this could translate into a £500k saving per new-build.
This set me searching the web for other weird and wonderful ideas for hotel designs. My quest took me to the niftily-named blog, Construction Projects World, which presents some of the more remarkable buildings - some of them hotels - currently being thrown up around the world.
The link above shows how a new wind-powered, rotating hotel planned for Dubai (where else?) will appear, once completed. As the blog says, the building will bring a new meaning to the phrase, "panoramic views".