Not just cold comfort, these portable shacks designed to be towed out onto frozen lakes come in a variety of forms, from the practical and resourceful to the funny and artistic.  These ice fishing hut designs demonstrate how surprisingly warm and cozy the simplest of shelters can be – and prove that people who live in the world’s coldest climates (happily spending their spare time engaging in recreational outdoor activities in subzero temps) are way hardier than the rest of us.

Fishing Hut & Hot Tub Combo

A group of local anglers in Calgary came up with a pretty brilliant way to stay warm while out on the ice: a towable hot tub, which they pull out onto frozen lakes alongside their fishing hut. It takes a couple hours to heat up, but the waiting time has got to be worthwhile once you get in. “We weren’t catching any fish, so we thought we’d do something else,” says the tub’s creator, Scott Chesterman.

Ice Fishing Hut with Frozen Walls

Rather than hauling a pre-made hut out onto the water, you could work with what’s already there. This mobile fisherman’s hut design by Norwegian architecture studio Gartnerfuglen is made of a wooden frame and wire mesh, used as a form for ice. Once the walls freeze into place, the inside is insulated. In the summertime, it can be used as a garden shed, with the wire supporting climbing plants.

The Art Shanty Project: 8 Creative Hut Designs

Is this the polar opposite of Burning Man? Over 1,000 artists have designed and built creative ice shanties for the annual ‘Art Shanty Project’ over the last decade, covering the frozen surface of a Minnesota lake like an iced-over version of the popular desert festival. The creations include wooden stick-framed shacks, geodesic domes, tipis, sculptural structures and mobile shanties of all kinds, put on display for thousands of tourists to see for an event that’s uniquely Minnesotan.

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Angling For Warmth In Winter 21 Ice Fishing Hut Designs

These hidden shanty towns, often invisible from the streets below, sprawl like surrealist suburbs across the roofs of one of the most densely-populated and expensive cities in the world.

The book Portraits From Above meticulously documents a series of such informal micro-villages in Hong Kong with photographs, detailed diagrams and stories of life inside these illicit rooftop communities.

While the dwellings are unconventional in shape, the book’s drawings are almost deceptively refined, capturing the chaos in clean black-on-white architectural lines.

Ad hoc architecture at its strangest, these structures are not governed by building codes or compliance issues. Found materials from sheet metal and scrap wood to discarded plastic and broken brick shape home walls and the narrow halls between homes.

Naturally, one downside of such unplanned habitats are the series of power and waste management issues that go with the territory.

Despite living on the fringes – or perhaps because their shared connection – there are strong social ties between rooftop dwellers, and they were welcoming to the authors of this book, Stefan Canham and Rufina Wu, who sought to learn more about how people live in such offbeat accommodations. In many ways, too, these mini-cities are like smaller expressions of larger-scale phenomenon like the nearby but now-demolished Kowloon Walled City.

From the foreword: “There is no elevator. We run eight floors up the stairs … out of breath. The roof is a maze of corridors, narrow passageways between huts made of sheet metal, wood, brick and plastics. Steps and ladders leading up to a second level of huts. We get lost …. Rufina knocks on a door. A brief conversation in Cantonese. Stefan stands in the background, the foreigner, smiling, not understanding a word. They listen to us,  smile and invite us into their homes. Later, we look from a high building on the other side of the street down at the building [we were on before]. The roof is huge, with thirty or forty households, like a village. From the outside it is impossible to guess what it looks like on the inside.”

Later, “We walk back up the stairs. We no longer get lost in the corridors. We learn how the residents rebuild their homes and keep [them] in good shape. There are people who live for twenty or thirty years on the roof[s]. The newcomers from China, Southeast Asia [and] Pakistan still do it …. Some underlying buildings slowly disintegrate, because the concrete was mixed with salt water. Most residents roof would not mind to live in one of the new high-rise buildings, but they can not afford it. All are afraid to be resettled in the satellite towns, where there are few prospects. The rooftop settlements are an urban legacy. They tell of the history of Hong Kong, the political upheavals in China, renovation, and demolition speculation, [structural] calculations and what people need to live in the city.”