SOME PLACES SEEM TO HAVE everything going for them. Untouched by natural disasters and blessed with physical beauty that seems almost contrived, they’re rightly envied. European cities such as Venice and Amsterdam, with their tight cores and storybook settings come to mind. So too does a modern metropolis like Hong Kong, with the choppy waters of Victoria Harbour and the vertiginous tree-covered peak that frames its skyline.
These are the thoughts crossing my mind as I walk the heart of Copenhagen, where 17th- and 18th-century brick façades with painted steeples stand side-by-side with refurbished, stucco-faced fin-de-siècle city villas. These surroundings might seem unremarkable, even expected, for a northern European city, until you consider that just over half a century ago, many cities in this part of the world were being pummeled into oblivion by the bombs of World War II. Yet Denmark’s 839-year-old capital escaped virtually unscathed, relative to other European nations, and that is all but miraculous.
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At the Hotel Fox, rooms range from small to extra-large. |
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That Denmark has managed through the epochs to survive both politically and culturally is especially remarkable in light of the fact that the country’s land has virtually no natural protective barriers of any kind, and has been smack-dab in the path of invading armies going back to the Middle Ages — most recently when the Nazis occupied the country during World War II. All this history has taken place under the watchful eye of the Danish monarchy, which dates back to the 10th-century kingdom of Gorm the Old and is the world’s second oldest, after Japan’s.
Today, Copenhagen’s hardy and achingly fashionable inhabitants, who account for about 20 percent of Denmark’s population, focus their energies on making it through the long, cold, and dark winter. And if the crowded pubs, lounges, and restaurants I encountered during my first visit, two years ago, are anything to go by, they have a fairly pleasant time of it.
Following that earlier Copenhagen primer, I had pledged to make another sojourn to Scandinavia’s largest city in the warmer months. And so, armed with a sheaf of contact information and a midsize valise, I check in to the newly opened and much talked about Hotel Fox, in the Jarmers Plads neighborhood in the heart of the city. A collaborative effort involving 21 graphic designers, illustrators, and graffiti artists, many of them just-graduated art students, the whimsically designed hotel — with no two rooms alike — in many ways epitomizes Copenhagen’s youthful energy and exuberance.
I walk past the angular, low-to-the-ground lobby furnishings, which are occupied by svelte, twentysomething women and sharp-suited men enjoying muesli, to the hotel’s whitewashed resin check-in counter, which conveniently doubles as the in-house bar and where breakfast is served. Having established that I want a “large” room, from a choice that ranges from small to extra-large, the stylish receptionist clicks around a computer monitor and, having done an inventory, shows me photos of available rooms on the hotel’s Web site.
It takes a few moments of indecisiveness on my part before one of the model-like guests, up for a refill of freshly squeezed orange juice, makes a suggestion. “Take 404. That one’s designed by Japanese illustrator Shinya Chisato,” she says in perfect English. “It’s my favorite and the only one in the building with tatami mats and not a mattress.” Denmark, I think to myself, isn’t the land of the shy.
To fully appreciate Copenhagen’s free-spirited vitality and its eco-friendly ethos, and to bear witness to the city’s transformation from staid Old World capital to dynamic regional powerhouse, you ought to bike it. That was the advice a friend and frequent visitor gave me on my earlier sojourn, but with freezing temperatures and a driving snow, I opted not to join the squadrons of men and women of all ages two-wheeling it in the city’s dedicated paved bike lanes.
This time, however, equipped with one of Hotel Fox’s smart Kronan bikes, I hit the road. My first destination is the up-and-coming Vesterbro quarter, in the city center, where
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The Pisserenden area is home to a host of designer and vintage clothing shops, cafés, bars, galleries, music and book stores, and jewelry boutiques. |
I am to meet with Natasja Jensen, the proprietor of N&J Design. Vesterbro, like many of the other outlying areas surrounding Copenhagen’s center, was until just a couple of years ago a rather seedy proposition. The preserve of the sex trade, its streets were lined with brothels, pay-per-hour hotels, prostitutes, and the demimonde. Now though, says Jensen, “you’re more likely to find boutiques like ours and cafés, and not just a couple, but dozens.” She ought to know; as one of the early enterprising locals, Jensen set up shop here two years ago and has been watching the makeover from her front-row perch.
Jensen points me to nearby Halmtorvet, the square on which Copenhagen’s meat market used to stand. Today, that commodious turn-of-the-century space has been transformed into an exhibition hall and gallery; some of the once blood-splattered streets around it are outfitted in new cobblestones; the nearby modernist lofts are among the city’s priciest; and the bistros and boîtes that cater to those au fait enough to live in the neighborhood are filled with perma-bronzed, perma-happy Danes.
I walk into PH Caféen, a three-year-old coffee bar where jazz is often on the nightly bill, and again it doesn’t take long before I am in conversation — this time with a design student who has her studio in the area. I ask her about Denmark’s affinity for design. “It’s because we love beautiful things. And we allow
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The five-mile-long Øresund Bridge is the centerpiece of a 10-mile artery that connects Denmark to Malmö, Sweden. |
for free expression in order to make it a reality, no matter how creative or out-of-the-box it might be to some,” she says, referring confidently to a glut of city projects — from the recently completed Copenhagen Opera House, on an island that was once a naval base, to architect Zaha Hadid’s addition to the Ordrupgård Art Museum and Daniel Libeskind’s stunning Danish Jewish Museum — as examples of this philosophy.
To illustrate her point, she talks about how some of her Copenhagen University friends will soon be bedding down in the Bikuben Residence, a sleek, steel-clad dormitory that opens later this year. “Tell me, wouldn’t you be inspired to experiment and create if you lived in a structure as stunning as that?”
With so much history behind them, Danes, and Copenhageners in particular, are more than comfortable looking to the future. Whether it’s inaugurating the five-mile-long Øresund
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The Gefaerlich Café’s retro look entices the locals. |
Bridge, the centerpiece of a 10-mile artery that connects Denmark to Malmö, Sweden, or fashioning an entirely new city altogether — in this case Orestaden, a collection of transparent buildings occupying a marshland that abuts the airport — they are not ones to fret over what’s next.
Copenhagen is expanding beyond the city center’s tidy jumble of pedestrian-friendly streets and surrounding beltways to places where the country’s next generation of upstarts — be they garage rock bands, movie directors, or fashionistas — are setting up shop.
One area that has emerged as the next bohemian hotspot is Christianshavn, across the Inner Harbor. There, each summer, a few abandoned quaysides are leased by the city to industrious promoters and organizers for that prototypical Northern European pastime, the beach club. Here, on disused docks, young, bikini-clad sybarites raise wine glasses and nibble on organic greens while their soigné male counterparts, decked out in elusive Euro labels, take a break from their Tuborg to do somersaults into the frigid water.
But this is no lager-fueled showmanship. In fact, nearly everyone I meet in Copenhagen has a rarefied, almost academic, air of utter sophistication. Forget for a moment that virtually everyone speaks English and then another two languages to boot. Also forget, if you will, that they can probably understand another three tongues (German and Swedish are both common). Lastly, ignore the fact that they’ve probably traveled to more places than most of us ever will. It’s all enough to induce instant insecurity, regardless of how well rounded you may consider yourself.
What’s more, the locals all seem to dress the part. Fashion goes hand in hand with design here. So while it’s perfectly appropriate (and almost mandated by the laws of cool and the carless city center) to ride your beat-up single-gear bike between an A-list schmooze and an illicit warehouse all-nighter, you had better make sure that once you’ve dismounted, you’ve got all the right closely cropped, monochromatic duds.
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Zoo, an urban bar on Kronprinsensgade, attracts Copenhagen’s fashion set. |
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Cofoco offers an unusual dining experience with a communal table and the city’s first no-smoking policy. |
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The city’s hottest lounge, Umami. |
Decked out in my sleekest outfit, I make for the city’s hottest lounge-cum-restaurant, Umami. Located north of the city center, the bustling bilevel space mixes Asian-influenced modernism with Gallic flair in its design. It is filled with chic habitués, including a laid-back set enjoying lemongrass-sake cocktails at the stylish martini bar. Other equally decked-out patrons are seated downstairs in front of plates of sushi. The product of restaurateur Jesper Boelskifte, Umami is the latest in a line of new-fangled restaurants — which also include Bo Bech’s inventive Restaurant Paustian and Rene Redzepi’s radical, fusion-styled noma — that are giving Copenhagen a reputation among gastronomes.
Another hip eatery is tiny Cofoco, in Vesterbro. With its exposed brick interior and long communal high table, Cofoco lacks the visual flash of Umami, but the Franco-Danish meals that emerge from Thomas Skou’s kitchen are no less impressive. “We try to create an unexpected dining experience,” Skou says. That experience is no doubt enhanced by the restaurant’s no-smoking policy, the first of its kind in Copenhagen. “With patrons sitting so close to each other, we didn’t want smoke to be an issue,” the chef explains.
Despite the hubbub and bonhomie in the outlying areas of Vesterbro, Nørrebro (an emerging, ethnically mixed area northwest of downtown), and Islands Brygge (an industrial area crisscrossed by freight rails and filled with residential buildings), the heart of Copenhagen is still very much central to the lives of those who live here. I decide to reacquaint myself with it.
Starting at Rådhuspladsen, or City Hall Square, I walk along the mile-long Strøget, a pedestrian avenue lined with Danish retailers like Georg Jensen, Bang & Olufsen, Ro3yal Copenhagen Porcelain, and Tage Andersen. Eventually I reach Kongens Nytorv, a broad square anchored by the grand Hotel d’Angleterre and by Magasin, a multilevel department store where a basement newsstand, flanking an outsized delicatessen, carries design titles from far and wide.
Even here, in the commercial heart of this city of 1.5 million, Copenhagen’s forward-thinking vision stands out. Instead of big-box retailers and ubiquitous international labels like Boss and Hermès, it’s vitrine after vitrine of custom haberdashers, couture shops, and indie design emporiums that line the quaint offshoots of Strøget. Nearby, street-chic fashion outlets, the city’s best new and used music stores, vintage clothing shops, and a half dozen galleries define the Latin quarter, Pisserenden. New hotels, too, have emerged. Along with the Hotel Fox, perhaps the most touted is the Hotel Skt. Petri. When it opened three years ago in a 1930 Functionalist building that once housed a department store, the Skt. Petri was hailed as Copenhagen’s first design-inspired hotel since Arne Jacobsen’s Royal, which dates to 1960.
For all its daytime bustle, though, Copenhagen’s downtown remains strangely distant and absent after hours. One evening, following cocktails with friends, we got a hankering for a late-night meal. So we naturally walked over to the concierge, who informed us that all the better restaurants in the area serve their last meals no later than 11 pm. “For anything later than that,” he said, “you’ll have to venture outward.” My thoughts exactly.
— Farhad Heydari
Getting There: Continental will begin daily nonstop service to Copenhagen from its hub in New York/Newark on May 23.
