There are all kinds of hotel categories: boutique hotels, eco hotels, heritage hotels, apartment hotels and capsule hotels, to name a few. (To say nothing of motels, hostels, lodges, resorts, inns, pensions, guest houses, flophouses, bunkhouses, bed and breakfasts, holiday cottages and caravanserai). But chances are you’ve never stayed at a “landscape hotel.” That’s because, chances are, you’ve never stayed at the cool Juvet Landscape Hotel near the village of Gudbrandsjuvet, Norway, a five-hour drive north from Oslo.
The landscape hotel category was virtually invented by the Juvet and the Norwegian architectural firm that designed it, Jensen & Skodvin. The idea was to create a hotel that’s minimalist in design, that blends into its environment and that offers amenities oriented outwards towards the surrounding nature.
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Shipping containers. Is there anything they can’t do for the environmentally-conscious architect?
Shipping containers can be stacked and arranged into all manner of cool buildings. They’ve been fashioned into a shipping container amphitheater. They’ve been melded into a shipping container office park. Outside of Seattle, you can even order an extra-hot half-caf double-tall non-fat extra-dry cappuccino from a shipping container Starbucks.
The problem is: all the world’s shipping container buildings aren’t near enough to make use of the estimated 800,000 containers that are abandon by shipping companies every year. Which is why Spot Cool Stuff was thrilled to learn about the ECOntainer, the world’s first bridge to be constructed out of used shipping containers.
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Once tasked with delivering messages for the Rebel Alliance, R2-D2 has been reduced to holding up your butt as, literally, a piece of lawn furniture.
Spot Cool Stuff previously reviewed 10 creative pieces of jewelry geeks will love. If are thusly geek-inclined but looking for less of a personal accessory and more for something around-the-house, consider one of these five pieces of geek-friendly furniture. Each was inspired by a video game or a science fiction movie:
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Spot Cool Stuff has written before about installing hidden doors inside your home — secret passageways from one room to another. But hidden doors can also also be on the outside of a house. And, as the video below shows, they aren’t necessarily that difficult to install. The key is to blend the look of the door in with the house with some secret means of opening it.
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If you had to spend an entire vacation wearing no other footwear besides a pair of flip-flops which model would you want to take?
Spot Cool Stuff has been busy lately researching this exact question. We’ve been testing more than two dozen pairs of flip-flops across several categories. But there’s one model we are already certain will make our final cut: the Sazzi Decimal Sandal.
One needn’t look at a Sazzi Decimal for more an instant to spot its two most pronounced features: the four toe posts and the footbed with individual toe cutouts.
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