How We Look At It

A shared room, for this guide, is the room in a hotel that nobody in the building owns. It is the kitchen table, the lobby bench, the yard, the bath house, the hall the street can walk into. It is the room the plan gave to everybody at once, and it is usually the room that decides how a building works.

Each entry has three headings. The Room They Share describes the room itself: where it sits in the plan, what is in it, what it was before. Who Turns Up says who published material puts in it — residents, neighbours, restaurant bookings, ticket holders. What The Room Makes Possible stays with the room and says what follows from the way it is built: one table, one stair, one door.

We do not describe the people. We never say what kind of guest a hotel attracts, whether a room is friendly, or whether anyone will meet anyone. That is not something a plan can tell you, and a guide that claims it is selling something. We describe furniture, doors, ceilings and published use, and we stop there.

For the same reason there are no programmes, no schedules and no named events on this site. A hall that is set out for performances is described as a hall that is set out for performances; what happens in it on a given night is not our subject and would be out of date by the time you read it.

Say It At The Desk is a line of preparation, not a complaint. It names the one thing about the shared room that is easier to settle at the counter than to discover later: which door, which level, which building, which hours. It is written for the moment you arrive with a bag in your hand.

Filed In gives a month and a year. It is the month we last opened the published material behind that entry. Buildings change hands, rooms get divided, ground floors close for works. The date tells you how old our reading is so you can judge it yourself.

The material comes from what hotels publish about themselves, from architectural and trade press, and from the descriptions of the buildings these hotels were made out of. We write it in our own words. We do not publish prices, stars, ratings, booking links or paid placements, and nobody can pay to appear here or to have an entry changed.

There is a Casino Hotels section because four Canadian resorts happen to hold some of the largest shared rooms in this guide: concert and theatre halls, and the ground that runs from them out to water. Those halls and that ground are what we describe. The gaming floor is not described, not assessed, and not treated as a room where guests meet.

One thing about the design is worth saying, because it carries meaning. On this site colour is not decoration: each section owns a colour, and it holds the entries, the links and the menu item. Blue is Casino Hotels, orange Capsule Hotels, magenta Art Hotels, turquoise Ice Hotels. Wherever you land, the colour of the block tells you which part of the guide you are reading.