Copenhagen Admiral Hotel is housed in a more than 200-year-old grain-drying warehouse from 1787. For centuries, this building and location on the waterfront have been at the epicentre of amazing events. The grain-drying warehouse, built by the merchant company Pingel, Meyer, Prætorius & Co, has been historically preserved. The warehouse is built from the finest raw materials, and in all its architectural splendour stands as an eloquent testimonial to the prosperous trading period of the 1780s. The building’s impressive joists are made of pine from the great forests of Pomerania, today northern Germany and Poland. This was the era of the great sailing ships and a time when the port was bustling with lively activity. The warehouse stands right at the spot that was the heart of all maritime traffic to the rest of Denmark and the world. The two warehouses making up the Admiral Hotel capacitated 30,000 barrels of grain, and a grain-drying oven was sponsored by the royal family. The midsection joining the two warehouses, which today holds our lifts, etc., was built 100 years after the warehouses, around the end of the 19th century. Fire became the city’s enemy. In 1728 and 1795, fires ravaged the alleys behind the ramparts. And on 26 February 1794, at 3pm, the monarch’s residency, Christiansborg Castle, was ablaze. The royal family was hastily evacuated, and all citizens lent their assistance in a frantic effort to extinguish the fire with hand-driven pumps and water buckets, which were passed from hand to hand in living chains from the canals. The fire in Christiansborg Castle brought the warehouse and granary an unexpected neighbour. The royal family stood without a home and, opposite Toldbodgade, four rich families from the aristocracy had asked the famous architect Nicolai Eigtved to design four rococo-style palaces surrounding an octagonal piazza. The autocratic monarch, King Christian VII, acquired all of Amalienborg and moved in. Copenhagen quickly recovered from the fires. But England felt that the Danish merchant fleet threatened its sovereignty over the world’s seas, and on 2 April 1801, Admiral Lord Nelson made his move. The famous “Battle of Copenhagen” in 1801 took place virtually right outside the warehouse windows, and if someone sought refuge behind its thick walls, he may have witnessed when the one-eyed English admiral, Lord Nelson, who lead the attack against Copenhagen, put his telescope to his blind eye to avoid seeing his superior’s signal to retreat. On 3 August 1807, an enormous English fleet closed in on Copenhagen, which braced itself for a new siege. The enemy’s artillery, consisting of bombs and rockets never seen before, whistled over the warehouse, leaving the streets flooded with homeless, wounded and dead people among the burning ruins. Many of the wounded were quartered in our lounge, where the old grain-drying oven used to be. Already when the hotel opened, the project involving the restoration of the old building received a diploma from Europa Nostra, an international organisation working to protect Europe’s cultural and natural heritage. Europa Nostra cited as its motivation for giving us the diploma: ‘this is a project that greatly contributes to the protection and enhancement of European architecture”. With the royal palace on its starboard side and central Copenhagen on its port side, Copenhagen Admiral Hotel stands as a Danish and international flagship, where culture, design and service are alpha and omega. In every way, our guests find themselves nestled between the past and the future.....
more
