Bakkehuset: the house-museum of the Danish Golden Age in Frederiksberg

A short walk from the former Carlsberg industrial site, today a district of Frederiksberg in the midst of transformation, on Rahbeks Allé stands a low, irregular building that many tourists walk straight past without noticing. This is Bakkehuset, the "house on the hill", whose structure is thought to date back to the 1520s. It stood along the main road linking Copenhagen to Roskilde and for a long time served as an inn; over the centuries it has been a farm, a private residence, a psychiatric hospital and an orphanage, before becoming a museum in 1925.

The Rahbek couple

The reason it is worth a visit lies in the chapter connected to Knud Lyne Rahbek, writer and publisher, and his wife Kamma Rahbek. Rahbek had frequented the house since 1787 and bought it in 1802 as a private home. During the years they lived there, Bakkehuset became one of the meeting points of the city's literary and intellectual circles, above all thanks to the salons hosted by Kamma. It is one of the emblematic sites of the Danish Golden Age, the cultural season that in the early nineteenth century swept through literature, philosophy and science.

The guests of the salons

Among the documented guests of those salons are names that carry weight in Danish cultural history: the poet Adam Oehlenschläger (married to Kamma's sister), the jurist Anders Sandøe Ørsted, the writer Jens Baggesen, Poul Martin Møller, Bishop Jacob Peter Mynster and Bernhard Severin Ingemann. And, of course, a young Hans Christian Andersen, who found here one of the settings that welcomed him in his early days. In later years the house also hosted, as summer residents, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the actress Johanne Luise Heiberg and the theologian and poet N.F.S. Grundtvig.

The visit

The visit unfolds through a series of memory rooms, arranged to recreate the interiors of the era and dedicated to the figures who lived here. You move through intimate spaces, with furniture, objects and domestic atmospheres: it is an intimate museum, more a home than a palace. Outside, traces remain of the garden created by Kamma Rahbek, who on the original estate (about 3.5 hectares) laid out a pond, meadows, flowers and rare plants. It was one of the first private English-style gardens made in Denmark, and it is precisely this combination of period interiors and historic greenery that makes the place a secluded corner of the city.

How to get there

Getting there keeps you comfortably within Copenhagen: the museum is in the Frederiksberg district, next to the Carlsberg quarter, well served by the city network (the Carlsberg S-train station is the nearest). It is worth pairing the visit with a stroll through the Carlsberg area now being redeveloped, with its restored industrial architecture. Before setting off, check opening hours and days on the official website (bakkehusmuseet.dk): being a house-museum of modest size, its opening times are more limited than those of the big museums in the centre.

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