Six fields, one question, and a rule about naming names.

THE MAKING — the first field says what the building physically is: the material of the walls, whether the rooms are cut, moulded, packed or delivered, and how the parts stand up. It is a description of substance, not of atmosphere.

WHOSE HANDS — the second field names the people. The rubric is called this because the answer is not always an architect: it can be a carver, a quilter, a mason, a module manufacturer or a fit-out contractor. Where a practice or an individual is published, the name is used. Where it is not, the sentence stays general and the entry says so rather than guessing. This guide does not invent an author, a workshop or a technique.

MADE AGAIN — the third field is about repetition. Some of these buildings are destroyed by the weather every spring and rebuilt from cut blocks. Others replace a mattress, a panel or a floor of rooms on a commercial cycle. The field records what actually comes back rather than what merely gets cleaned.

MADE ONCE — the fourth field is the opposite: the ground, the shell, the geometry, the agreement or the decision that cannot be taken again. This is the only place, along with the closing line, where a year appears.

WORTH ASKING — a single question that a reader could put to the hotel when booking, and that follows from the entry rather than from a checklist.

CHECKED — the month the entry was last read against published sources.

Quality is not assessed here. Whether a room is well or badly made is a judgement about a working company, and this guide does not publish criticism of the businesses it describes. It describes how something was produced and stops there.

Sources are the hotels’ own published material, architectural publications and archives, interviews with the people credited, museum and industry material, and the published records of the operators. Nobody from this guide has stayed at these hotels, and no entry reports on a stay. Where a claim could not be confirmed in published material, the wording is kept general.

Not published, in any entry: prices or any remark about cost, stars, scores, rankings or awards, room counts, floor counts, opening hours, seasonal dates, booking links or paid placements. This guide takes no money from the hotels described and has no relationship with them.

The guide includes a Casino Hotels section because those four Canadian resorts are large buildings with documented construction histories, and they answer the same question as the rest. The gaming floor is not described, pictured or assessed anywhere on this site.

Corrections are welcome, particularly where an attribution is wrong. The contact page explains what is useful to send.