Until recently, the Copenhagen hotel landscape was defined by a certain unmistakable restraint — pale oak, grey linens, the quiet hum of good design. Hotel Bella Grande, which opened in 2024 in a restored 1899 building a short stroll from City Hall Square, arrives as a stylish counter-proposal. Spearheaded by the Copenhagen Food Collective, the hotel’s premise — a contemporary grand hotel with an Italian soul and a Copenhagen heart — was realised by Malene Bech-Pedersen and Mette Bonavent of Tonen, whose reference points run less to Arne Jacobsen than to Venice.

The ground floor is where the Italian accent is loudest. Inspired by a Venetian palazzo arranged around an open-air courtyard, the designers have washed the walls in peach, laid carpets in bold florals and introduced rounded forms — curved couches, mushroom lamps, ovoid mirrors — that soften the building’s 19th-century bones. Donna, the hotel’s flagship restaurant, is a cinematic set piece: a dark red ceiling, blood-toned banquettes, pink curtains and lamp-lit tables producing an atmosphere that teeters between romance and a waking dream. Its Italian kitchen has made it one of the hardest tables to land in the city.

Upstairs, the mood cools into something quieter but no less composed. The 109 rooms and suites are dressed in a more muted palette — cream, burgundy, dusk gold — with dressing tables replacing desks, vintage oil paintings in gilded frames and soft, rounded silhouettes in armchairs and headboards. Bathrooms are lined in pink-veined marble, a sly reminder that this is a hotel that has not read — or has pointedly ignored — the Scandinavian style manual. The cumulative effect is one of European grand-hotel glamour, slightly theatrical but never in costume, perfectly at ease in its Copenhagen setting.

Beyond the rooms, a lobby bar pours afternoon Camparis into wide-cut glasses; the atrium serves summer dinners under the open sky; a small gym, tucked off the main circulation, looks more like a club than an amenity. In less than a year the combination — food-led hospitality, a design that mixes its genres, an address in the middle of everything — has shifted what a Copenhagen hotel is allowed to be. Bella Grande proves that grandeur, filtered through Nordic proportion and Italian warmth, need not mean formality; that a hotel here, done right, can feel like a long weekend in Venice.