The six conditions
What a condition is, how we write one up, and what this guide leaves out.
Ground that falls away or refuses to be levelled: cliffs, lava, steep banks that decide where a building stands
A river, lake or waterfall at the boundary of the site, shaping how the building is placed and turned
A winter season that supplies the material and then removes it, so the building exists only part of the year
An airport floor instead of a street, with no plot, no facade and no quiet hour to work with
An older structure that had to be kept, so all new work happens inside walls somebody else set
A tight urban plot with neighbours on every side, where space has to be won from the plan itself
Why six
A condition is the circumstance a building had to work with before anything was designed: the ground, the water, the season, the floor it stands on, the walls it inherited, the neighbours pressing on the plot. Working through eighteen hotels, we found that these six covered every case without splitting hairs. A seventh would have described one building only, and a fifth would have forced two unlike things together. Each hotel is given one condition, the one that shaped the most decisions.
The three parts of an entry
The condition sets out what was there: the slope, the river, the frozen months, the terminal hall, the protected shell, the width of the plot. The answer sets out what was built in reply: where the building stands, which way it is turned, what carries it, what was kept and what was added. What you see of it describes what any visitor can notice on arrival. We do not write about intentions. If a source says a wing rests on legs above lava, we write that; we do not write what the architect wanted to express.
Conditions are not a scale
The six do not rank. A cliff is not harder than a narrow plot, and an airport floor is not more interesting than a shell that had to stay. There is no scoring, no ordering from easy to difficult, and no comparison between one type and another anywhere in these pages. The colour attached to each condition is a label, nothing more. Two hotels sharing a condition are not thereby similar buildings.
Why all four Canadian resorts share one condition
Every hotel in the Casino Hotels section stands at the edge of water: an island in the St Lawrence, the rim above the Niagara gorge, the bank of the Fraser delta, the shore of Lake Couchiching. That is a fact about where they were built, not a decision we made to keep the section tidy. Because the condition follows the site, all four entries in that section carry the same colour.
One more thing
Every entry ends with a line of preparation. It is there so that you arrive knowing something practical: that a site is stepped, that a building stands airside, that a structure exists only in winter, that the outlook differs from room to room. It is not a complaint and not a fault. These are working hotels, and the line describes the building, not the service.
Looked at
The month printed under each entry is when we last went back to the published sources for that hotel and checked that what we had written still held. It is not a visit date, and it is not a claim that nothing has changed since.
Where the material comes from
We work from published material: the hotels' own descriptions of their buildings, architectural publications and project documentation, and reporting that deals with the site and the structure. Four of us have kept this guide since 2018. Two write, one checks the facts, one photographs; there is no shared office. We do not publish accounts of staying anywhere, and nothing here should be read as a report of a night spent in a building.
What this guide does not publish
No prices, no star grades, no ratings or scores, no booking of any kind, and no paid placements. We take no commission and we do not accept payment to add, change or remove an entry. Opening times and schedules are outside what we cover, because they change and because they are not part of a building.
Why a casino section at all
Four of the buildings we wanted to write about are casino resorts, and a guide about difficult sites would be poorer without an island of exhibition pavilions and a building set into the wall of a gorge. The section is about those sites and structures. The gaming floor is not described, not pictured and not assessed, and there are no links to gaming sites or applications anywhere on distillerycfo.com.
A condition is our shorthand for the circumstances a building had to work with, taken from published sources and written in our own words. It is not a category anyone applied for, not a difficulty score, and not a promise about a stay. The month under an entry is when we last checked those sources.