December 13, 2023
Tablet is your source for discovering the world’s most exciting boutique hotels — places where you’ll find a memorable experience, not just a room for the night. For over twenty years we’ve scoured the earth, evaluating hotels for every taste and budget, creating a hand-picked selection that’s proven and unforgettable. Now, we’re the official hotel selection of the legendary MICHELIN Guide.
Here are the top boutique hotels in Copenhagen, Denmark:
The term “design hotel” gets thrown around a lot, but rarely is it applied to a century-old building whose interiors seem to have crystallized sometime around 1955. Copenhagen’s Hotel Alexandra is a time capsule; it’s as if someone fed the pages of a textbook on original mid-century Danish design into a 3-D printer and out popped its guest rooms, culminating in a series of thoroughly realized homages to several of the great Danish furniture designers.
It bears underscoring: the hoteliers are really into Danish furniture here, especially chairs. They’re fond of an anecdote that boils down to the idea that it’s harder (and more praise-worthy) to build a chair than it is to build a library, a movie theater, a warehouse, a city hall, a school and a couple houses, all put together. Their collection of chairs, accumulated over the decades, is impressive indeed. Perhaps more importantly, they’re all there — in the Arne Jacobsen room, in the Hans Wegner room, in the Finn Juhl room, and on it goes — for the sitting in, the way they’re supposed to be, while watching TV or reading one of the hotel’s many books on, you guessed it, the very Danish designers whose work fills the rooms. Though the entry-level rooms are minuscule, the main distinction between the rooms and suites, more than size, is the degree to which they’ve realized the vision of a particular designer.
Flying in the face of Copenhagen stereotypes, the Andersen Boutique Hotel traffics lightly in export-grade Scandinaviana. Fun precedes functional, with nary a pale wooden chair in sight. In-your-face graphics trump comforting coziness, and carpet, rather than smooth planks, covers the floor. Nevertheless, the coat hangers come from Muuto, a design outfit specializing in New Nordic, and some staff wear uniforms from the hip local label David Andersen Denmark.
This smaller offshoot of well-known, family-run Absalon Hotel uses fabrics and colors from the famed Designers Guild to achieve a freshness and gloss that the more established property doesn’t desire or require. Lively hued blankets in geometric patterns cover the ubiquitous Quilt of Denmark duvets, like kites passing over puffy clouds. Everything pops. Sinks and toilets come from Philippe Starck.
In downtown Copenhagen's Latin quarter, just off the Strøget (the famed shoppers' walk), is the Hotel Skt. Petri. The very large building was previously home to the Daells Varehus department store, and the hotel's exterior retains the quaint, retro-futuristic look of the 75-year-old building.
The interiors are more modern, and the rooms are the perfect picture of the contemporary Scandinavian hotel room, from the blonde hardwood floors and eccentric-yet-sensible furniture to the golden sunlight streaming at a sharp angle through the windows. The color schemes are by renowned Danish graphic artist Per Arnoldi, whose characteristic blocks of colored fabric hang above the headboards.
Copenhagen is certainly one of the world’s capitals of design, as well as the epicenter of hygge — that indefinable coziness that’s become the hallmark of Nordic hospitality. But until recently its hotel scene was somehow less than the sum of its parts. Among the hotels that are changing that, however, is the Sanders, a 54-room luxury boutique hotel owned and operated by the celebrated Danish ballet dancer Alexander Kølpin.
The London-based design team Lind + Almond transformed this 1869 building into something that’s both cozy and modernist, both contemporary and nostalgic, blending lush comforts with moody atmospherics and everywhere embellishing the impeccably stylish spaces with little visual surprises. It’s as mature a hospitality debut as we’ve seen in a long time — these rooms are the equal of any high-end boutique hotel, not just in Copenhagen but in London or New York, which is all the more impressive for the fact that the Sanders is a one-off.
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