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The Olsen belongs to the Art Series group, and the idea behind that group is simple. Each hotel takes one Australian artist and builds itself around the work. Here the artist is John Olsen, a painter who spent a career on water, birds and the dry inland, and whose lines do not sit quietly on a wall.

The hotel stands on Chapel Street in South Yarra, which is a shopping street with trams down the middle and a long line of cafes. That matters more than it sounds. You walk out of a building hung with paintings and straight into the ordinary noise of Melbourne, and the two things sharpen each other.

Inside, the work is not confined to a gallery corner. Prints and originals run through the corridors and the rooms, so guests meet the collection on the way to the lift rather than by making a decision to look. Suites are the format the hotel is known for, many with kitchen benches and glass-fronted balconies.

Of the six hotels in this section, The Olsen is the most urban and the easiest to reach without planning. It is the one we would send a first-time visitor to, because the hotel explains its own premise within about a minute of arrival.

QT Sydney occupies two buildings that were never meant to be a hotel. One is the State Theatre, a 1929 picture palace of gilt and marble that still runs as a theatre. The other is the Gowings building, a department store that dressed Sydney men for the better part of a century. The hotel runs through both.

That history is the whole point. Corridors change direction because the two buildings never lined up, floor levels shift, and rooms sit in shapes that no architect would draw from scratch. Some look into the old store's light wells. The result is a hotel where the plan has to be discovered rather than understood at the door.

The interiors are deliberately theatrical, which suits a building that shares a wall with a working stage. There is a restaurant, a bar upstairs and a barber shop on the ground floor, all leaning into the same idea. Guests turn up for the rooms and stay downstairs longer than they planned.

Among the six art hotels here, this is the one where the art is the building itself rather than a named painter. It is also the most central: Market Street puts the Queen Victoria Building, the Pitt Street malls and the harbour within a short walk.

A capsule hotel sells a bed in a moulded berth, not a room, and this one does not pretend otherwise. Capsules are stacked along corridors, each closing with a screen or a door rather than a wall, with a light, a socket and enough headroom to sit up. Bathrooms are shared and down the hall.

The format came from Japan, where it solved a specific problem: a bed near a station for someone who missed a train. Sydney has borrowed the format for a different set of guests, mostly people who want a city-centre address for a night without the price of a room they will only sleep in.

What makes it worth listing is the discipline of the design. Everything is worked out to the centimetre, because there is no spare centimetre. Storage sits under or beside the berth, the corridors are narrow by design, and the common area does the work a lobby and a lounge would do in a larger hotel.

It is the smaller idea of the two hotels in this section, and the more traditional reading of the format. If you have stayed in a capsule in Osaka, you will recognise the plan immediately. What has changed in the crossing is the guest: fewer commuters, more travellers with a bag and an early flight.

Icehotel began in 1989 in Jukkasjärvi, a village in Swedish Lapland north of the Arctic Circle, and every ice hotel that followed is answering it. The hotel is built each winter from ice cut out of the Torne river and from snow sprayed over steel forms, and each spring the river takes the material back.

That cycle is the design brief. Nothing is meant to survive, so nothing is designed to. Artists are invited to work on the individual suites, which means the hotel is a different building each year, with a different plan, different rooms and different carving. Photographs of one winter describe that winter only.

Sleeping in it is a specific experience rather than a comfortable one. The interior holds a few degrees below freezing regardless of the weather outside, guests sleep on ice beds under reindeer hides in insulated bags, and warm accommodation with proper bathrooms sits alongside for the rest of the stay.

Of the six hotels in this section, this is the one to read first. It set the pattern the others work within: cut, build, open for a season, and lose the whole thing to the thaw. Every hotel that came afterwards has had to decide how closely to follow that pattern.

This one exists because of a world's fair. The buildings on Île Notre-Dame were the French and Québec pavilions of Expo 67, and they were designed to be looked at: angular, layered, more sculpture than shed. Rather than being demolished when the fair closed, they were kept and eventually converted.

The conversion is the interesting part. A pavilion built to move crowds through in twenty minutes had to become a building people stay inside for an evening, and the levels stacked inside the original volume are what came of that. You move up and down through the building far more than you move across it.

There are restaurants with a serious kitchen behind them, and a regular programme of live music through the year. The upper levels look back across the water at the Montréal skyline, which is the view the pavilions were given in the first place.

The setting is a park island in the St Lawrence, shared with the rowing basin and the racing circuit left over from the same era. It is green, flat and open, and it feels a long way from a downtown hotel even though the city is directly in front of you. Few hotels anywhere have a stranger origin, and fewer still have kept the shape of the building they started as.

Casino Rama stands on the lands of the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, beside Lake Couchiching in central Ontario. That ownership is the first thing to say about it, because the resort was developed on and for those lands, and it is the reason a building of this size sits in a rural township rather than in a city.

The site is lake country. Couchiching and Simcoe are cottage lakes, and the landscape around the resort is water, low bush and golf rather than streets. The buildings spread horizontally across the ground, with the accommodation set apart from the entertainment side.

The concert hall is the part that draws people from a distance. It is large, it books touring acts through the year, and a night there is what fills the rooms upstairs. Alongside it are restaurants across several formats and a spa, arranged so that the resort works as a self-contained weekend.

Of the four hotels in this section, this is the one most tied to its landscape and the least tied to a city. It is also the one where the drive is part of the plan rather than an inconvenience. The route north out of Toronto through the lakes is the beginning of the stay, not a delay before it.