Marklund Atelier

The grain store had stood empty for two decades and had been stripped of everything but its structure — a grid of cast columns, a timber deck, and a brick shell whose openings had been bricked up and reopened so many times the façade read as a record of its own indecision. We chose to leave that record legible.

The guest rooms occupy the upper three floors and are set as free-standing insertions rather than partitions: each room is a lined timber box that stops short of the existing ceiling, so the original deck and its beams run continuously overhead through the whole plan. Where a box meets a column, the column passes through it. Guests share the building rather than being sealed into compartments of it.

Inside those boxes the register changes completely. Walls are lined in oiled oak and hung with heavy undyed linen that can be drawn across the window, the bed, or the whole wall. The bathrooms are in a single warm-grey stone with no threshold at the door. There are no downlights anywhere in the hotel — every room is lit from a wall-mounted alabaster shade at the head of the bed and a single low lamp by the chair, which means the rooms are dim in a way that guests either resist for one night or ask us about afterwards.

The ground floor is given to the harbour rather than to the hotel. The lobby is a long table, a fireplace and a bar, all of them usable by anyone who walks in from the quay; reception is a drawer in the end of the table. In the evening the room fills with people who are not staying here, which was the brief's least measurable and most important requirement.

Every fitting in the building was made within two hundred kilometres — the beds and the long table in Jutland, the alabaster shades outside Aarhus, the linen woven in Sweden. Where we could not source locally, we did without.

Vinterhavn