Hotel Ottilia - Beer, Bricks, and a Woman Named Ottilia: Inside Copenhagen's Most Unlikely Hotel

There's a hotel in Copenhagen where the walls once held the weight of six million liters of beer. Where a curved light installation trails down from ceiling to bar like a vertebral column, and where 64 golden discs on the facade each represent the bottom of a beer bottle. Where, if you find all 15 hidden ceramic tiles scattered across the building, someone will pour you a free glass of wine.

Hotel Ottilia, tucked inside two former Carlsberg Brewery buildings in the city's evolving Carlsberg City district, is the kind of place that earns its reputation not through manufactured quirkiness but through genuine, layered history - history that has been carefully preserved rather than sanded down for comfort. The building's bones are all still here: the concrete, the silos, the beams, the clockwork. What's been added is just good design.

Location

The hotel sits at Bryggernes Plads 7, which translates, pleasingly, as Brewers' Square. It's the only hotel in the Carlsberg City District, a neighborhood in active transformation that sits between Vesterbro, Frederiksberg, and the inner city.

The area spent more than 150 years as an industrial brewing complex and is now becoming something else entirely - design shops, galleries, cafes, and boutiques are filling in the gaps between the historic listed buildings. The cultural infrastructure is still catching up with the ambition, which gives the whole place an appealing sense of becoming.

In practical terms, you're a five-minute walk from the Enghave Metro Station and about ten minutes by train from City Hall Square. The Meatpacking District, Copenhagen Zoo, and the shopping street Istedgade are all within easy reach. If you get disoriented, look for the famous Elephant Gate at the entrance to the Carlsberg grounds, or, failing that, the gold discs on the facade.

How Two Brewery Buildings Survived 150 Years

The story starts with a family dispute. In 1880, Carl Jacobsen - son of Carlsberg founder J.C. Jacobsen - set up his own brewery on a neighboring plot after his father terminated his lease on the original site. He called it Ny Carlsberg (New Carlsberg).

The older of the two hotel buildings dates to 1881, designed by Vilhelm Dahlerup, and served as brewhouse, malt storage, and housing for unmarried workers who doubled as fire guards. The tower was originally a water tower. The second building, Storage Cellar 3, came in 1969 to a Functionalist design by Svenn Eske Kristensen, built to hold six million liters of beer.

The tanks were removed in 1995, and both buildings sat in various states of secondary use until the hotel conversion, with both now listed in the Danish registry of protected buildings. The hotel opened in 2019 and takes its name from Ottilia Marie Jacobsen - Carl's Scottish-born wife, a strong presence at the brewery, and an enthusiastic admirer of thistles.

The Architecture: Discs, Zippers, and Round Windows

The adaptation of these two very different buildings was handled by architect Poul Schülein from Arkitema Architects, in collaboration with professor Christoffer Harlang from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

The central challenge was daylight: how do you bring light into a building whose listed facade you can barely touch? For Storage Cellar 3, the answer was the "zipper" window - tall, narrow openings cut into the brickwork on each side of the golden mosaic discs that dominate the Pasteursvej facade. The discs represent the cylindrical tanks that once sat directly behind them, their gold evoking the beer inside.

The opposite side of the building, facing Bryggernes Plads, offers the hotel's most distinctive feature. Each disc finds a counterpart in a large round window - deep enough to accommodate a curved, leather-cushioned seating nook.

The circularity is intentional: the discs and the round windows echo each other across the building, one opaque and golden, one transparent and open to the square below. Over in Dahlerup's 1881 building, the round tower - once a water tower - now holds the hotel's suites, with multi-paned windows that curve with the walls.

The Lobby Bar

The bar is the first thing you encounter when you walk into Hotel Ottilia - check-in happens here, which flattens the formality of arrival and works better than it might sound. The space is built directly into the former malt storage building, and the original concrete silos are still present, rising around you as you order.

The walls are massive, the surfaces are steel, and the sense of industrial scale is immediate. A small water basin sits opposite the bar with a quietly grounding effect. The visual anchor is a custom light installation running vertically from bar counter to ceiling - Ottilia's spine, per the hotel's own description, made by Swedish studio RUBN.

Gin is the bar's signature, with both well-known and rare bottles on offer. The standout is the hotel's own Wilderness Gin, made with botanicals handpicked from Danish nature in collaboration with Henrik Hammer of Geranium Gin fame.

There's also Ottilia Lager, brewed exclusively by Carlsberg using rooftop-grown hops and yeast recovered from an 1883 bottle. The house wine, ONE, comes from Portuguese winery Adega Mayor. If you're staying at the hotel, wine is on the house daily from 5 to 6 PM, and spirits follow from 10 to 11 PM.

The Social Spaces

Adjacent to the lobby bar is the Dipylon Hall, the former entrance gate to the Carlsberg Brewery. The ceilings here reach 20 meters, which gives the space a grandeur that's difficult to replicate. Designer furniture is placed throughout - it functions as a lounge, a working space, and an informal meeting spot - and the industrial bones of the original structure are fully on display.

The detail worth pausing on is the clockwork. The clock visible on the outside of the building has its mechanical movement housed inside the Dipylon Hall, where you can actually see it working. It still rings every half hour during the day, though it's not entirely reliable on time - it loses minutes and requires manual winding. This seems fitting for a building this old.

The wooden benches you'll find throughout the hotel are another layer of recovered history. They were made by Søren Brøchner-Mortensen, the owner of Brøchner Hotels, using wood salvaged from the grain silos in the Dipylon Hall. If you look closely at the grain of the wood, you can see actual grain - seeds caught in the cracks from the building's former life.

Beyond the Dipylon Hall, the hotel has several smaller social spaces clustered near the lobby bar. There's a Chambre set up as a quiet working space, and a set of living room-style lounges furnished with custom sofas and lower ceilings than the main hall. These are where Wine Hour and Nightcap Hour effectively unfold in the evenings.

Throughout all of these spaces - and extending up through the hallways toward the rooftop - you'll find 15 ceramic tiles made by a local Vesterbro artist named Hiiri. Each depicts a thistle, the flower associated with Ottilia Jacobsen and her Scottish origins.

Finding all 15 earns you a complimentary glass of wine. The tiles vary in size and color and are not, apparently, placed in obvious locations. The thistle motif also appears in the carpets of the conference and meeting rooms, produced by Ege Carpets, and in various other decorative details throughout the hotel.

Restaurant Tramonto

The hotel's rooftop restaurant, Tramonto, serves Italian food - both fine dining and a more relaxed family-style format. The menu is built around classic Italian dishes with a willingness to experiment while staying grounded in quality ingredients.

Indoor seating gives you the industrial-meets-urban feel that runs through the rest of the building; outdoor seating on the rooftop terrace puts you above the Copenhagen skyline with a 360-degree view of the city. Tramonto serves lunch and dinner, with the terrace most appealing in the warmer months.

Breakfast happens in the same space as Tramonto. The breakfast program, branded "Good Morning. It's Organic!" across all Brøchner hotels, sources 90 to 100 percent of its ingredients organically and is built around seasonal produce.

The spread includes freshly baked bread, cereals, fruit, homemade smoothies, fresh juices, and specialty coffee prepared by an in-house barista. A glass of sparkling wine is also on offer with breakfast. Breakfast is included in all suite bookings and is open to people not staying at the hotel, which means it draws a local crowd as well.

The rooftop terrace doubles as the outdoor extension of Tramonto and the summer location for drinks from the bar. The view takes in Copenhagen in most directions, including the Carlsberg City District directly below.

Hops are actually farmed up here - the same hops used in the Ottilia Lager brewed by Carlsberg. In warmer months, the terrace functions as one of the better spots in the neighborhood to watch the sun go down over the city.

Pick Your Industrial Fantasy

The rooms across the hotel share a design language rooted in the building's industrial past - raw concrete walls, brown tiles inspired by the original facade tiles, half-open bathrooms, and contrasting soft elements like rugs, curtains, and leather cushions. Blackout curtains are standard throughout. Each room includes a bedside lamp called "Ottilia," custom-designed by RUBN.

Standard Double

The standard doubles are located behind the golden discs on the Pasteursvej facade of Storage Cellar 3. Ceilings reach 3.4 meters, which makes even a room in the 23-to-25-square-meter range feel more spacious than the footprint suggests.

The zipper windows bring in natural light while keeping the rooms private from the street. The industrial atmosphere is immediate: concrete walls, original architectural details, and the general sense that something very large and very heavy used to occupy the space just beyond the wall. There's a work area and a lounge chair.

The bathroom is half-open to the bedroom, with a rain shower, hairdryer, and bath amenities from Danish brand Humdakin.

Deluxe Double Room

The deluxe doubles are on the Bryggernes Plads side of the building, and their defining feature is that round window. It's large enough that a leather-cushioned seating nook is built directly into it, curving with the shape of the glass, with a panoramic view of the square below. Rooms run between 29 and 34 square meters, and the same concrete and tile aesthetic runs throughout.

The effect of sitting in that window - whether you're reading, watching the square, or doing nothing in particular - is genuinely distinct. The bathroom is half-open, with a rain shower, hairdryer, and Humdakin amenities.

Suite

The suites split into two distinct personalities. Those in the 1881 tower have circular bedrooms and living rooms that follow the curve of the structure, with multi-paned turret windows, herringbone parquet floors, and stucco ceilings - closer in feel to a well-appointed Copenhagen apartment than a hotel room.

The suites in Storage Cellar 3 lean into the industrial aesthetic: exposed concrete, original white tiles, or uncovered brick, softened by plush rugs and light curtains. All suites run between 30 and 50 square meters and include a separate living room, an all-inclusive mini-bar, and organic breakfast.

Bathrooms feature either a bathtub, a rain shower, or both, with underfloor heating and the full Humdakin product range.