Go Niche

WHEN IS A hotel not a hotel? If you think you know, then you haven’t yet been to the Pixel Hotel, in the Austrian city of Linz.

Set up last year as part of the city’s European Capital of Culture status, it is a very unconventional sort of lodging. Not only are no two rooms alike, but no two rooms are in the same building.

Instead, suites here are dispersed across the city. In fact, all over town. From residential areas to downtown shopping districts and industrial zones, interesting but unused premises have been converted into hotel rooms.

Stay at Pixel in the Courtyard, for example, and you’ll find yourself in a cabinetmaker’s workshop with an old freight elevator converted to a walk-in closet.

Tucked away down an alley between an African foods shop and an old fashioned haberdashers, stay here and you’re close to the city’s museums and just a short walk from the main square, Hauptplatz, and nearby shopping streets.

Forget about room service. What you get is a knowledge of the city of a kind guests in standard hotels never do – because for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you’re given the name of a restaurant, a map and a transit system pass. Twin-bed suites, including breakfast, start at €128.

* pixelhotel.at