Historic Hotel
Questionnaire
Year erected: 1905
What is the history of the property?
The hotel history started more than 100 years ago, in 1905, when the YMCA rented a building that master carpenter Niels Chr. Nielsen himself had acquired for 1,845 kroner. The purpose was to offer young craftsmen who worked at the port construction, which had begun in 1904, “a quiet and cozy place to live”.
The guest house immediately became popular, and in 1906 the YMCA bought the property, and expanded it already in 1907. At the census in 1916, there lived, among other two tailoresses, a substitute teacher, a typographer and a customs assistant. In 1917 there was a fire, and the subsequent refurbishment provided the opportunity for even more improvements.
After a quiet period, great things happened in May 1940. After an extensive rebuilding, the YMCA gets a “stately” facade, the same as we can see today. The building was expanded and modernized with cold and hot water in the rooms, and new shared bathrooms.
In 1975 the Mission Hotel, as the YMCA was then called, wasagain expanded and it became approx. twice as large. Shortly afterwards it was sold to private individuals and changed its name to Hotel Norden.
It was not until 1989 that the hotel got its current name after a competition among the city’s citizens. It was a group of nurses at the then hospital who got the idea and were rewarded with a dinner at the hotel restaurant. The hotel was modernized again and all rooms got their own bathroom.
Has restoration work taken place?
In 2013, after careful consideration and extensive refurbishment, the building was repainted in different colors. The white on the facade is a tribute to the historic YMCA (the old pictures are hard to interpret, but the color seem to have been white at the time). The oldest part of the building (the printer’s house from 1906) is painted in the typical Skagen yellow (inspired by Saxild Gaard’s color), while the “newest” building where the printshop was located is separated by a red color inspired by Ancher’s house.
