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HOSHINOYA Nara Prison is a new hotel and museum inside Japan’s only surviving “Great Meiji Prison,” a red‑brick complex built in 1908. Designed by architect Keijiro Yamashita with a radial “Haviland” layout, it operated for over a century as a prison and later juvenile facility. Closed in 2017 because of its age and earthquake risks. After years of delays, Hoshino Resorts converted it into a 48‑suite hotel (opened June 2026) and a museum that preserves cell blocks, corridors, and original brickwork.

In 1978, 23-year-old John Lavender, newly divorced and raising his young son Jason, promised him: "Someday I’ll build you a castle."

It took five years to find land, but he eventually bought a mountaintop in Bolton Landing after spotting a tiny ad and calling from a payphone. With no formal training or blueprints - just hand-drawn sketches - he began building the castle piece by piece, often planning each step the night before.

Friends, hired help, and eventually his teenage son contributed, even bringing in a high school football team to help with stonework. Over decades, they used about 1,000 tons of local granite. Lavender joked, "I said I’d build you a castle - I didn’t say you wouldn’t help."

In 2008, he fell off a ladder and shattered his leg in 20 places, spending eight months in a wheelchair. During recovery, he decided to open the castle to the public. In 2010, it began welcoming guests, with John and his wife Yvonne running it themselves.

Jason later became an architectural engineer - ironically inspired by a castle his father built with no formal training.

Photo of the Highlands Castle

The Maměnka mountain lodge in the Czech Beskids (Libušín), originally built in 1899 in a unique folk Art Nouveau style, burned down in 2014 and was painstakingly rebuilt almost entirely from scratch using traditional 19th-century techniques. With no original blueprints, restorers relied on old photos, salvaged just ~7% of the original wood, hand-carved new timber, recreated paints and glass by hand, and even rebuilt the structure twice (once in a workshop, then on-site like a giant puzzle). Today it looks almost identical to its 1925 version, but hidden inside are modern fire systems, including a museum-grade gas setup that can stop a fire without damaging the ornate wooden interior. It reopened in 2020.

Source | Photos

This former Nazi anti-aircraft bunker in Hamburg was converted into a hip hotel with a rooftop garden. The brutalist wartime fortress, which was deemed too massive to demolish, is now called the Reverb by Hard Rock Hamburg, a hotel with restaurants and a public rooftop park built above its 3.5-meter-thick concrete walls. The renovation, plus adding the extra five floors and the garden, cost €100 million. Before/after photos.

I wanted to add a couple of words because Molitor is a pretty fascinating place. It was opened in 1929, and it was the place where they showcased the first modern bikini. After the bikini debut, Micheline Bernardini (a nude model because nobody else took on the job to put on a bikini at the time) reportedly received more than 50,000 fan letters. During winters, the pool was turned into an ice skating rink.

From the 70s, it was abandoned, and Parisian street artists took over the place and painted graffiti all over it and organized illegal parties. Then, after a long and controversial reconstruction, it was finally reopened as a luxury hotel in 2014. But critics are not satisfied, as what you can see in the photo differs a lot from the original design.

The sightings usually occur between late October and mid-December, when the mangoes ripen.

Bonus: there is a multi-level car park in the next building, and there are two metro lines and many bus/tram lines within 100 meters. https://maps.app.goo.gl/QyeQtSVqw78muc2FA

It's a 261‑meter casino hotel known for its gold, lotus-inspired design that looks like a glowing lotus/Faberge egg. It is in the center of Macau, the world’s largest gambling hub by revenue. Inside the hotel, it's peak over-the-top with gold everywhere, giant diamond on display, and Michelin-star restaurants.

Photos by Aleksander Malachowski

According to Guinness World Records, the Mecca Royal Clock Tower is the tallest clock tower in the world meausing 141 feet × 141 feet (43 meters × 43 meters. By comparison, Big Ben's four faces are only 23 feet (7 meters) in diameter. The top four floors of the clock tower house the Clock Tower Museum. The Clock Towers is the world's largest hotel with its seven towers rising from the same base and a total of 7,988 rooms.