Icelanders have been masters of creative branding for over 1,000 years. Erik the Red thought up the name "Greenland" in about 985 to persuade visitors to come to a vast, ice-bound land mass he'd just discovered a few hundred miles west of Iceland. History doesn't record whether he told his fellow Vikings that it was "a fantastic space, with bags of potential".
The notion, which took hold in the 1990s, that Reykjavik was the hippest city in the known universe is a stretcher that Erik himself would have been proud of. Reykjavik is a city of 200,000 people – around the same as Swindon – on a bleak stretch of the North Atlantic. The climate is raw and the wind gives you earache. Beer costs seven quid a pint. Most of the buildings have been assembled from kits, as the Vikings cut down all the trees and the local rock is too crumbly to be much use for anything. But some ideas have an unstoppable momentum.
Housed in a old biscuit factory that overlooks Reykjavik's waterfront, the Kex Hostel is the poster-child for this bizarrely durable notion of Icelandic cool. It opened in April and sleeps up to 138 people in 32 rooms and dorms.
Most of the action takes place on a big open-plan floor that contains the reception area, a bar and restaurant, a tiny cubicle fitted out as a 1950s barber shop and an interior courtyard that opens out from the bar area. Two further floors have private rooms, family rooms, dorms, shared bathrooms and a communal kitchen. The whole place is furnished almost entirely with secondhand furniture.
A lot of thought has been put into the furnishing and the details of the design – which is, overall, spacious and relaxed. The key words here are "quirky" and "retro".
Twentysomething backpackers sprawled on the salvaged armchairs in the airy hallways, waggling their MacBooks at each other. And the bar seemed to be full of people blogging.
My twin room had a view of the sea, an old gym locker for a cupboard, a wine crate on the wall as a bookcase, and a Useful Old Desk. But I would have happily exchanged some of that impressive retro styling for better lighting and a Wi-Fi signal that actually made it all the way to my room.
And some of the hotel's self-conscious attempts at quirk were grating. For instance, the defunct factory elevator is adorned with quotations from The Big Lebowski, and a sign beside it invites you to put on a pair of headphones and listen to looped elevator music. This after you've lugged your suitcase up four flights of stairs.
If this kind of whimsy makes you want to punch something, you're in luck: one of the selling points of Kex is Box, a room fitted out like a boxing gym. However, an Icelandic catering firm had booked it for their office jolly, so I couldn't get in to pummel the heavy bag.
Overall, Kex evokes some of the following feelings: a Shoreditch bar, but nearer the Arctic Circle; the halls of residence of a trendy art school; and, more paranoically, the sense of arriving for your first term at university six months after everyone else to discover you're the least cool person there. But I suspect that, as a 43-year-old father of two who was mostly excited about visiting the Snorri Sturluson museum in Reykholt, I'm a bit outside the target demographic, which undoubtedly skews younger.
I don't want to sound too curmudgeonly. The staff were well-meaning if a little ditzy. And if you're keen to participate in the tyranny of hip, Kex is affordably hip. Staying in one of the dorm rooms (there are 16, sleeping between four and 16; earplugs are provided at reception) and using the communal kitchen make it an economical way to visit an expensive city. And it is, as Erik the Red might have said but probably didn't, a fantastic space.
• Kex Hostel (Skúlagata 28, +354 561 6060, kexhostel.is) has dorm beds from 2,200 Icelandic krona (around £12) and double rooms from £52, including breakfast. Icelandair (0844 811 1190, icelandair.co.uk) flies to Reykjavik from Heathrow, Manchester and Glasgow from £197 return
