Independent archive · est. 2026
The Absolut Icebar, kept on the record
Between 2002 and the late 2010s a Swedish hotel company and a vodka brand ran a small chain of bars built entirely out of river ice — walls, seating, artwork and the glasses themselves. This site is what is left of their website, reassembled from the public archive and annotated.
Start here
What the Icebar was
The concept, the partnership behind it, how the ice got from a frozen river in Lapland into a glass in central Stockholm, and what happened to the name.
Read the overviewStockholm
Vasaplan 4, opened 2002 and billed as the world's first permanent bar made of ice. The only one of the four that is still open today, under a different name.
The Stockholm barLondon
The West End bar beside the belowzero restaurant on Heddon Street — for years the UK's only permanent bar of ice. It has since closed.
The London barJukkasjärvi
The original, inside Icehotel, 200 km north of the Arctic Circle — the bar every other one in the chain was a copy of.
The original barMojave
A one-night ice bar built in the California desert in December 2009 for the unveiling of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. A storm hit. The bar stayed up.
The desert barPress archive
Ten dated press releases from 2008 to 2010, indexed as the original press page listed them, with what each one announced.
Browse the releasesA short history
The first ice bar is built at Jukkasjärvi in Swedish Lapland, as part of Icehotel. Three of the site's English pages give 1994; one Swedish press release says 1993.
A temporary Absolut Icebar is put up in the Niger desert for a fashion show featuring Kenzo, Mickael Kra and Alphadi.
The first permanent Absolut Icebar opens at the Nordic Sea Hotel, Vasaplan 4, Stockholm, held year-round at five degrees below zero.
London opens beside belowzero on Heddon Street and collects awards — Best New Bar at the 2006 London Club & Bar Awards, Coolest Bar from Prestige Events in 2008. In April 2008 the Stockholm bar reopens at double its former size, redesigned by graffiti artists.
Themed rebuilds come thick and fast: Factory in London and Stockholm, 365, Aquatic. In December an ice bar is built in the Mojave Desert for Virgin Galactic.
Icehotel marks twenty years. The Aquatic theme arrives in Stockholm in April. This is roughly where the archived website stops being updated.
The Absolut name comes off the bars. London closes. Stockholm continues at the same address as Icebar Stockholm by Icehotel, inside what is now Hotel C.
Why this domain has an archive on it
absoluticebar.com was the bars' official address for most of a decade, and travel writing from that period still links to it — a Telegraph guide to Stockholm, a Gothamist piece on working in the cold, MetaFilter threads, French and Romanian travel blogs. Those links had been pointing at nothing.
In 2024 the lapsed domain was picked up and filled with unrelated online-casino pages.
That material is not part of this site's history and is not served here: every one of those
URLs now returns 410 Gone. What remains is the editorial record.
How this archive was rebuilt, and what it does not have · Full index of archived pages