Historic artist-colony hotel reopens as the CORI Hornbaek with 77 rooms

The CORI Hornbaek Hotel reopened in late September as a five-star retreat with 77 rooms and five townhouses, set on the eastern coast of Zealand a 45-minute drive north of Copenhagen. The white functionalist building was designed by Ole Falkentorp in 1935 as a badehotel.

The hotel was occupied by Nazi soldiers in the Second World War and was later a hospital. Danish property group Copi acquired it in 2022, and the reopening returns the building to its original purpose as a seaside escape for moneyed city dwellers.

Copi is run by Jesper Brunander, 44, who describes it as one of Copenhagen's biggest private developers, specialising in listed buildings. His sister Maria Brunander Vøgg, 40, is managing director. The siblings grew up ten minutes from Hornbaek and have known the building, in Maria's words, "forever."

The badehotel was meant to anchor a grander masterplan that included a swimming pool modelled on the one built for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The war interrupted those ambitions, leaving Hornbaek as both an escape point for Jewish people bound for Sweden by boat and a Nazi haven.

Brunander's wife Anya is co-owner of the CORI. He began his career at 21 buying apartments and renovating them himself, after selling some horses, and he now breeds horses on a farm near Fredensborg, 19km from Hornbaek. He is also a keen polo player and former national showjumper.

Copenhagen-based architecture firm NVMBR handled the building itself, with about one-third of it consisting of new additions, though the joins are hard to spot. London designer Afroditi Krassa, originally from Greece, took on the interiors.

Interiors built for hygge and the sea

Krassa says she wanted to respect what the Danish do well, a sense of democracy and a lack of ostentation, while adding more comfort, softness and fun. Every room has a fireplace, the ultimate in Danish hygge, and room sizes start at 24 square metres, above the Danish average of 21.

The largest combined suite reaches 120 square metres. Beds are by Swedish company Duxiana, and furnishings in wood, canvas and leather were custom-made by Danish firm Gubi. Warm unpolished marble the colour of sand runs across the ground floor, along with stained oak panelling.

Historic Nordic pieces from the 1930s were sourced at auction, and art collector Christian Just Linde, a friend of Brunander, has lent works for the interiors. They include a nine-panel piece by Julia Haller and paintings by Anna Zacharoff and Pierre Alechinsky.

Lindes's own summer house, a 1913 Belle Epoque villa, sits ten minutes away. Sculptures from his collection appear in the Baroque gardens at the nearby Gammel Holtegaard, a 1757 mansion revived as an art foundation by life-science entrepreneur Claus Christiansen.

Gammel Holtegaard's director Andreas Zinck Henningsen stages temporary exhibitions, including a recent installation of 111 works by Tal R that closed in late September. A Georg Baselitz show of later works opens there on 10 October.

Food, spa and a modest luxury

The fragrance and toiletries were created by Isabelle Burdel, perfumer for Hotel Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, and include sea buckthorn berries from the dunes around Hornbaek. Experts from the Chedi Andermatt in Switzerland are developing longevity treatments for the spa, which will also welcome children.

The restaurant is overseen by Bocuse d'Or winner Brian Mark Hansen, serving foam- and fuss-free dishes built on local ingredients. Brunander says even Hansen acknowledges Copenhagen's dining has become so elevated that the guest is an accessory to a formalised event.

The Brunanders want both Danish tourists and foreign visitors to explore further up the coast from Copenhagen, while keeping Hornbaek's year-round residents welcome. Maria points to the capital's transformation, its restaurant scene, the Chart art fair, fashion week and new offices for Google and Microsoft.

Hornbaek has a longer lineage as a fashionable summer place. In the late 19th century painters including Peder Krøyer gathered here, drawn by the light and the fishing village life, producing a new kind of realism. Many of Krøyer's works now hang in Copenhagen's Hirschsprung Collection.

The artists later moved on toward Skagen, but Copenhagen's wealthy discovered Hornbaek and bought summer houses. Brunander hopes guests will wander through the hotel from the beach in their swimming trunks, an antidote to what he calls the big Rolls-Royces and white gloves of upmarket travel.

Nearby cultural stops include the Rudolph Tegner Museum in Dronningmølle, less than ten minutes by car, where the artist built Denmark's first Brutalist structure in 1938, a concrete octahedron for his sculptures. The Nivaagaard Collection of Golden Age art lies a few kilometres further.

Support the content you love — it’s free 🎉

Add Luxa Terra as a preferred source on Google. Our stories will be more likely to appear in Google’s Top Stories. It’s free and supports our team. Thank you!

Add as preferred source

You can remove us any time in Google’s source preferences.

Sources

1. The Art Newspaper Historic building in old Danish artist colony transformed into luxury hotel

This briefing is published daily using an AI-powered system crafted by Luxa Terra’s team and finely tuned to meet our editorial standards. While we continuously test and review the output, mistakes can sometimes happen. Tell us if you spot one.

Images: Tal R’s Moonwalk installation (2026) at Gammel Holtegaard Photo © Anders Sune Berg; Danish Riviera: a relaxed vibe and long, dune-fringed beaches make the small seaside resort of Hornbaek a fashionable place to spend the summer Photo: © Jacob L; Jesper Brunander of Copi Group, the developer of the CORI Hornbaek © Kristian Holm; The hotel’s interior designer Afroditi Krassa © Christopher Andreou; CORI Hornbaek Hotel