A luxury without witnesses

By Flavia Tomaello, https://flaviatomaello.blog/, Instagram @flavia.tomaello

Imagine a hotel without hallways. No elevator full of people with suitcases, no shared breakfast area, without the discomfort of crossing paths with a stranger in a bathrobe on the way to the bathroom. Now imagine that this hotel is also the home of a Danish collector obsessed with the design of his country, and that everything you touch in there, from the chair to the coffee cup, has its own name and is for sale. That’s The Darling, in Copenhagen, and it recently has a new room that you should see.
The pandemic changed many things in the hotel industry, and one of them was the way privacy is understood. One-room hotels began to appear in different cities around the world, more professional versions of the apartment you rent on Airbnb but with real hotel service. Copenhagen joined that trend with The Darling, although here the concept has a particular twist: it’s not just privacy it offers, it’s a complete immersion in twentieth-century Danish design, curated by two partners who know exactly what they’re talking about.
Jens Løkke and Uffe Buchard have been working with the country’s most important design brands for years through their agency, Darling Creative Studio. At some point they decided to stop creating campaigns for others and instead create their own space where all those brands could coexist. The result occupies the second floor of a building from 1730, in the heart of Strøget, the commercial street that crosses the historic center of the city. From the outside there is no indication of what is inside. You climb an old, half-crooked staircase, and suddenly you’re standing in the middle of what could be the most beautiful design museum in Scandinavia, except that there you can sit, sleep, cook and, if you feel like it, buy anything you see.
There are three residences that make up The Darling. The smallest, The Cozy, is fifty square meters. The Classic follows, with seventy, and adds a studio for those who travel for work. And above all, with one hundred square meters, is The Grand, which in addition to a bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom has its own dining room, designed for more formal dinners. The three share something in common, which is the basis of the entire project: Finn Juhl furniture distributed in every corner, contrasting with a selection of contemporary art that changes month to month. Sit in the Pelícano armchair, try the Poeta sofa, rest your elbows on the Nyhavn desk. Everything has a story, and everything, the owners insist, is yours if you want it.
But let’s go back to The Cozy, the latest to join the family and the main reason for this note. It is the smallest of the three residences, and therein lies a good part of its charm: it does not seek to impress by size but by the care put into every detail. Inside you will find a bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom, designed with a warmth that is surprising considering the compactness of the space. The living room, in particular, deserves a separate mention, because there is mounted the Panel System that Finn Juhl designed in 1953, made of oak, a piece that not even the most advanced collectors usually have the opportunity to see up close, much less use as if it were the living room of their own home.
Nothing in The Darling was left to chance. The green of the walls was specially mixed by the firm File Under Pop, inspired by the patina that the copper roofs of Copenhagen churches take on over the years. There is custom designed wallpaper by Helene Blanche. The house’s kitchen, made of smoked oak, came from the Københavns Møbelsnedkeri cabinetmakers’ workshop, and the bed is by Dux. The crockery is Royal Copenhagen, the cutlery is by Georg Jensen, the glassware is Holmegaard. Even the tea you’ll be served at breakfast is an exclusive blend, prepared by the Sing Tehus tea house just for guests of The Darling.
The interesting thing is that none of this feels like a catalog of brands put there to impress. Løkke sums it up well: they wanted the house to have a bit of imperfection, of life, so that it didn’t look like a museum but like a home. And it shows. The walls have marks of time, the floors creak in some areas, there are objects that seem to have just been left on a table by someone who left for a moment and is going to return. That feeling of someone else’s life, of being visiting someone else’s house, is probably the most difficult thing to create in a hotel business, and here they achieved it without apparent effort.
There is no reception or uniformed staff hanging around. All pre-arrival procedures are resolved by a conciliation service that takes care of reservations, activities and any special requests. If you don’t feel like going out to eat, you can ask a private chef to cook directly at home. And if you feel like going out, you don’t have to go far: most of the brands you see inside The Darling have their main stores less than five hundred meters away, in the neighborhood that the Danes themselves call the design district.
Staying at The Cozy is, ultimately, a way to get a taste of Copenhagen before hitting the streets. You will end up recognizing chairs in the windows that you already knew by heart because you used them for breakfast that same morning. You are going to walk differently, looking at the premises with different eyes, looking for that lamp or that table that you liked so much in the house that you didn’t even remember to take a photo of it because you were too busy using it.