Alexander Kølpin's slow, warm, lived-in boutique behind the Royal Danish Theatre — fifty-four rooms, a panelled drawing room, a rooftop conservatory, and the most copied hotel interior in Northern Europe.
"The interior the rest of the boutique hotel world has spent the past five years quietly copying. The drawing room is the address most editorial photo shoots end up using. Alexander Kølpin's gravity and good taste are visible in every room."
Hotel Sanders opened in 2017, the first hospitality project of Alexander Kølpin — a former principal dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet who built the property out of a long-running personal preoccupation with how a small luxury hotel ought to feel. The building, on Tordenskjoldsgade directly behind the Royal Danish Theatre, had been a townhouse and then a small classic hotel; Kølpin took it apart over a two-year renovation with the British design firm Lind + Almond, then reopened it as a 54-room boutique. The result was the most quietly influential hotel opening in Northern Europe of the past decade — the room and public-room photography landed across every design publication in the week the hotel opened, and the warm-earth palette, the panelled walls, the rattan furniture, and the layered textiles have been borrowed from in hundreds of subsequent hotels.
The 54 rooms and suites are individually composed — Kølpin and the design team avoided room types that read as repeating templates. Every room has a four-poster bed in solid English oak, hand-painted Japanese wallpapers, custom-loomed wool rugs, oversized brass pendants, and bathrooms in Belgian stone with brass fittings. The Junior Suites and the named suites at the front of the building (looking onto Tordenskjoldsgade and the rear of the Royal Danish Theatre) are the better choice; the inner-courtyard rooms are the smallest. The Sanders Suite, on the top floor, includes a private terrace with views over the rear of the Theatre and the rooftops south to Christiansborg.
The food and beverage programme is concentrated in three small rooms. Sanders Kitchen, the all-day cafe-restaurant on the ground floor, serves a fixed-menu breakfast, a French-Mediterranean-Nordic lunch and dinner, and a serious natural-wine list. The Living Room, the public drawing room beside the lobby, runs as a long-day cocktail and tea space — and it is this room that is most heavily photographed and most frequently borrowed from elsewhere. Tata, the rooftop conservatory and bar, is open seasonally (April through September) for cocktails and small plates with views across the Theatre's rooftops.
There is no spa, no pool, no gym beyond a small fitness alcove — Sanders is deliberately minimal in its physical-amenity programming, and the small-hotel feel is partly a function of that decision. The position is the best of the listed Copenhagen boutiques: directly behind the Royal Danish Theatre, two minutes' walk from Kongens Nytorv, three minutes from the d'Angleterre. Service is warm and unscripted in a way the larger flagships cannot be — most of the staff have been here since the opening and the recognition that comes with a small-hotel return-stay is the property's most notable asset. Sanders is the address most Copenhagen weekend visitors should be considering first; it is the boutique against which the rest of the city is honestly measured.
For Copenhagen honeymoons that want the small, the warm, and the considered rather than the grand-hotel register, Sanders is the answer. The Sanders Suite for the upgrade, an evening at the Living Room before dinner, the rooftop conservatory in the warmer months, and the position behind the Royal Danish Theatre (a Royal Opera or Ballet booking and a thirty-second walk back to the hotel) make the city honeymoon close to itself. The hotel handles the recognition reflexively and the staff continuity means a multi-night stay compounds.
For solo travellers — particularly editorial, fashion, or design professionals — Sanders is the obvious answer. The Living Room is genuinely comfortable for a single guest with a book, the Kitchen runs a single-table-friendly service, and the small-hotel scale produces the kind of recognition you cannot buy in a 282-room flagship. The small Standard rooms are honestly tight; the Junior Suite category is the right booking for a solo three-or-more-night stay.
For an anniversary at the small-hotel end, Sanders runs at high effectiveness — the four-poster suite, the private dinner setup in the Living Room (the kitchen will arrange a takeover for the evening with notice), and the rooftop conservatory in the right season. It is not a grand-hotel anniversary in the d'Angleterre register; it is the smaller, warmer, more domestic version of the same brief and is consistently the answer for repeat-stay couples in their thirties.
Tordenskjoldsgade 15
1055 Copenhagen K
Denmark
Kongens Nytorv metro M3/M4 three minutes' walk; CPH airport 16 minutes by metro
54 rooms & suites
Standard Rooms from €450/night
Junior Suites from €690/night
Sanders Suite from €1,800/night
Check-in: 3:00 PM
Check-out: 12:00 PM
Opened: 2017 (Alexander Kølpin's first hotel project)
Sanders Kitchen all-day restaurant
The Living Room drawing-room bar
Tata rooftop conservatory (seasonal)
Behind the Royal Danish Theatre
Small Luxury Hotels of the World member
Hand-painted Japanese wallpapers in every room
From €450/night. Only 54 rooms — book five months ahead for spring weekends and any Copenhagen Fashion Week period; book direct for room-type specifics.
Book This Hotel →A 1909 Moorish-revival fairytale palace inside Tivoli Gardens with thirty-eight rooms and a heated rooftop pool.
Eighty-seven suites, an indoor jungle pool, and a strict adults-only policy near the Lakes.
The Cofoco restaurant collective's first hotel — eighty-nine rooms in two restored Vesterbro townhouses.