BOUTIQUE HOTEL · AARHUS · 2024

Hotel Søgrund

Twenty-eight rooms, a lobby, and a restaurant for a family-owned hotel by the Aarhus riverfront — designed to feel less like hospitality and more like a good friend's house.

The lobby desk: a limed-oak counter carcase with its transaction shelf cantilevered over it, standing free on a plank floor in hard raking afternoon sun.
  • Location — Aarhus Ø
  • Rooms — 28
  • Completed — 2024
  • Scope — Interior architecture, FF&E, lighting design

Søgrund's owners asked for warmth without nostalgia. The answer was a material register borrowed from Danish coastal houses — lime, oak, wool, and brass — applied with the discipline of a gallery.

A window seat: a deep oak bench built into a plaster reveal, with birches beyond the glass.
The restaurant in evening light: oak tables laid and waiting, plaster walls, dark windows and warm lamps.
A guest corridor at night: low wall washers throwing light down a reclaimed plank floor between oak doors.
“Guests keep asking who did the interiors. We keep a stack of the studio's cards at the desk now.” — Søgrund family

Each guest room pairs a sleeping alcove in smoked oak with a deep window seat. The lobby's limed-oak desk anchors a room that otherwise changes with the daylight; by evening, wall washers bring the plaster to life.

Brass fixture close-up: a wall light glowing against a textured white plaster relief.