Archive · Press release

Stockholm: Aquatic

Press release, 29 April 2010. Absolut Icebar Stockholm greets the summer with new ice and sub-zero temperatures.

What it announced

The last of the themed rebuilds the archive has a full release for. In April 2010 ice designers and sculptors from Icehotel turned the Stockholm bar — "Stockholm's coolest waterhole", the release calls it — into an underwater world, launching on 29 April, built from ice harvested that March from the frozen Torne River.

The room

• Light installations imitated light reflecting below the surface.
• A large monkfish was frozen into the ice, "with its half-moon shaped mouth and sharp, luminous teeth."
• Real footage of fish, jellyfish and other sea creatures was projected onto the ice walls.
• A large periscope stood over the drinks menu.
• Bar staff wore marine jackets made for the theme, and the drinks were built to match it.

Quoted in the release

Astrid Lundquist, head of communication, put the inspiration back on the river itself: people have always been fascinated by water in all its forms, and the Torne is the material every Absolut Icebar is built from. Tobias Ekman, chief executive of Nordic Hotels, made the commercial case — a new theme each season is what keeps the experience changing.

Two figures worth keeping

The release closes with the standing boilerplate, and it contains the only capacity figure in the whole archive: the Stockholm bar took a maximum of 60 guests at a time, and guests were advised to book ahead. It also repeats the dating the rest of the English record uses — the original ice bar created in Jukkasjärvi in 1994, the world's first permanent ice bar opened at the Nordic Sea Hotel in 2002, rebuilt every season, held at a constant −5 °C all year.

That 60-guest figure squares with the Street Art release two years earlier, which said the 2008 rebuild took the bar from thirty people to twice that.