The bars · Sweden

Absolut Icebar Stockholm

Nordic Sea Hotel, Vasaplan 4 — opened in 2002 and marketed, for the rest of its life, as the world's first permanent bar made of ice.

The bar

Stockholm was the proof that the Jukkasjärvi bar could be moved somewhere with a temperate climate and kept frozen all year. It sat inside the Nordic Sea Hotel next to the central station, held at five below zero by a computer-controlled cooling system, and it worked: by around 2010 the site was claiming more than a million guests across the chain.

Guests were issued capes and gloves at the door and given a fixed slot inside rather than an open-ended stay — the archived opening-hours block lists a separate late drop-in window from 21:45, which tells you how tightly the sessions were scheduled.

Twice the size, in graffiti

The bar's most-covered rebuild came in April 2008. The room was enlarged to hold twice its previous thirty guests, and the new interior was designed by the graffiti artists Daniel "Ikaroz" Diaz and Pierre "Slak" Johansson, with ice artists Mark Armstrong and Mikael Nilsson. Both graffiti artists had been working on the street-art scene since the mid-1980s; the brief was to build an urban interior using nothing but ice.

"It was great to be able to work with an organic material such as ice, and then transform it into an urban form of expression," Diaz said in the press release. The bar's own spokesperson made the more memorable claim: that it must be the only bar in the world made partly of "a several-metre-long ghetto blaster of ice."

The Street Art press release, 22 April 2008

Themes in Stockholm

• Street Art — April 2008, the reopening at double size.
• Jewellery — November 2008.
• 365 — April 2009.
• Factory — premiered 2 November 2009. Self-illuminating ice drinks, frosted cogwheels, icy pipework, and a live camera feed from the ice store in Jukkasjärvi. The look was drawn from the factory buildings in Jukkasjärvi and in Åhus, in Skåne, where Absolut is distilled.
• Aquatic — April 2010, an underwater room with ice periscopes and cabin windows, the staff in submariner dress.

Opening hours, as published

Kept here because it is part of the record, and for no other reason. In the archived capture the bar listed autumn-to-spring hours of 15:30–23:00 Sunday to Thursday and 15:00–01:00 Friday and Saturday, with summer opening from 12:45. These hours are from around 2010 and are not current. The phone number and booking link that appeared beside them have been left out deliberately.