Ålesund has its own niche in history. The town was almost completely destroyed by fire in 1904. Constructed largely of timber, the town burned easily with the fires, driven on by strong winds, completely overwhelming the efforts of townsfolk to fight them. Now 425 buildings remain from the 460 or so built with the help of contributions from the German Kaiser in the Jugenstijl (Art Nouveau style), as a mammoth rebuilding went on to rehouse the survivors. The town has remarkable homogeneity of architecture, spoiled only by the brutality inflicted on it by contemporary architects whose insensitivity to the surrounding architecture is only too evident. Despite this Ålesund has recently been voted by Norwegian readers of the Dagbladet newspaper as Norway’s most beautiful city

Choice has maintained the stylistic unity of the dockside with this conversion of an old dried salt cod warehouse into a remarkably pleasant hotel, where some rooms open directly onto the harbour itself, enabling guests to open their sliding windows and become a part of the busy life of a typical working dock and marina. A century ago this little harbour would have been crammed with double parked steam powered trawlers in place of the motor cruisers and luxury yachts that fill it today (anything below 40 foot is referred to contemptuously by local boatmen as ‘Tupperware’).

Warehouse conversions can pose problems for designers as the height to width ratios of the floor plans create difficulties in the utilisation of the space, as there tend to be large areas in the centre where it is difficult to get natural light. Also whilst the proximity of the docks is now seen as a bonus, this has not always been the case. When the Albert Dock conversion was being undertaken in Liverpool it was apparently offered to the local art school as a new home, but was turned down because the college authorities feared having to fish drunken art students out of the docks themselves. Looking now at the many conversions of docklands around the world it is remarkable how short sighted that policy now seems, especially as the Albert Docks are now occupied by the Tate Liverpool.

Many ports have seen trade move to the deepwater areas needed by the container ships that now carry most goods, and the older Victorian dock areas have been redeveloped as exciting areas for apartment living, frequently with hotels as a major engine of regeneration – examples include Cape Town, London, Melbourne, and Dusseldorf. Here the dock area is quite small and sits alongside a working port servicing the North Sea oil industry and the growing market for Fjord cruising, typified by the Hurtigruten line, whose ships are regular callers here. Strangely the working port area houses the few remaining pre-fire timber buildings still in use, now housing the port authority. However the charm of this beautiful little city rests in the overwhelming proportion of the buildings built at the same time in the same style. A strong sense of history obviously influenced the designers of the Clarion, with several of the rooms in a suite almost museum piece set-ups in the way they are laid out.