Henning Larsen wins Nordhavn hotel in Copenhagen: a silo-like tower and a brick-toned neighbour

Copenhagen's Nordhavn is getting a new lifestyle hotel, and Henning Larsen will design it. The studio has won the architectural competition for a project of around 15,450 m² on a triangular plot at the corner of Sundkrogsgade and Helsinkigade, developed by AKF and PensionDanmark and operated by Bühlmann Hotels. The scheme brings at least 360 units into two buildings, with construction planned to start in the third quarter of 2027 and opening expected at the end of 2029.

Two buildings, two characters

The programme is split in two. A hotel tower of around 10,450 m² (12 storeys, according to the Danish trade press) holds the hotel rooms. Next to it, a lower building of around 5,000 m² contains serviced apartments for longer stays. A basement of around 1,150 m² completes the scheme.

Each volume answers a different part of the district's memory. The tower is drawn as a light, sculptural vertical form that refers to Nordhavn's silos and to the industrial scale of the harbour. The lower building takes on a red-brown character that links it to the brick architecture of the nearby Århusgade quarter. The developers compare the sharp corner of the plot to New York's Flatiron Building.

A façade that changes scale at street level

The most concrete envelope idea in the competition design is about scale. As the tower comes down to the ground, its façade depth breaks into smaller elements, so that the silo-like mass reads at the size of a person where people actually walk past it. No cladding materials have been announced yet; at this stage the description is about form, depth and colour rather than systems.

A street shaped by the wind

Between the two buildings runs a car-free inner street, which the team calls the hotel's outdoor foyer. Café and restaurant tables spill into it, with planting, benches and sheltered niches, and it opens a new route towards the harbour. A bridge links the two buildings above the street, with a covered drop-off point beneath it.

On an exposed harbour site, this space only works if the wind is tamed. According to Henning Larsen, the tower is positioned and shaped to shelter the street and improve wind comfort, while planting at the street opening and the bridge at the far end help reduce wind speeds. "It's where the hotel and the neighborhood become one," says Design Director Mikkel Eskildsen.

The ground floor is meant to be public: café, restaurant, coworking, meeting rooms, an atelier, wellness and a lounge. The project targets DGNB Gold and the Danish low-emission class (lavemissionsklasse).

Why it matters for the envelope

In a windy harbour district, the outer skin of a tower decides whether the street at its foot is usable. Here the façade is asked to do three jobs at once: carry an industrial reference at the scale of the skyline, break down to a human scale at the base, and work with massing and planting to protect a pedestrian street. Add the Danish low-emission class, which caps the embodied carbon of the whole building, and material choices for the cladding will matter as much as the image. These are the details worth following as the design develops towards construction in 2027.

Credits

Architect: Henning Larsen (Design Director Mikkel Eskildsen)
Developers: AKF and PensionDanmark
Hotel operator: Bühlmann Hotels
Site: Sundkrogsgade / Helsinkigade, Nordhavn, Copenhagen (plot sold by By & Havn)
Illustrations: Henning Larsen

Sources: Henning Larsen (news, 5 November 2026); Dansk Byudvikling (26 October 2026).