An adjoining museum also features artifacts from the Pearl Harbor attack and a 70-seater theater screening archival naval footage.

Room with a view

Not all boatels have to float on water though. Perched on top of London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, this fantastical boat looks out over the city's River Thames, Big Ben and St. Paul's Cathedral.

A Room for London is a one-bedroom installation intended to be a space for artists, writers and musicians, to stay for one night and create new works inspired by the great city rumbling beneath them.

The building is based on the Roi des Belges, the riverboat that author Joseph Conrad sailed up the Congo in 1889, and later used as the inspiration behind his famous book Heart of Darkness.

The modern reincarnation however, includes a crow's nest, octagonal library and a cabinet of visual curios.

"With its combination of painted wood and hand-worked gold and silver coated metals, it seems to echo the simplicity of a Japanese tea-hut or the rural haphazard quality of a midwestern farm building," said organizers.