The spiral staircase giving access from the ground floor to the meeting rooms above stretched the technology of the day. It is this marriage of design, function and form with the possibilities of emerging technologies that was the strength of the original

Corner rooms are blessed with ribbon windows on two walls giving views of the city streets, and from higher rooms across the rooftops. It can be disconcerting to see a building moving through the city – the docks are in the centre of Copenhagen and the liners entering via the narrow waterway are comparable in size to many of the city blocks.

In the bedrooms extensive use has been made of maple for panelling the walls giving a light clean feel. The practise of having separate manually drawn blackout curtains and dress curtains is less than satisfactory and the marking of the edges of the curtains where they foul the window restraints is evidence of this. Use of electric curtain tracks or simply lining the dress curtains with a blackout lining, making them one, would have avoid this problem in an otherwise harmonious and effectively designed room layout.

Use of maple throughout the refurbished rooms gives a light, very Scandinavian, feel. Bedhead lights get very hot, but lighting panels in the bedhead wall are effective as room lighting. Windows fill two walls in this corner room as rollover shows.

The lobbies have generous wardrobe space and house all the usual tea making and other facilities. Generous use of mirrors is made throughout to maximise the feeling of space, and with the large window expanse floods the room with the soft Scandinavian gloom – sorry, I mean light. Bedrooms are not, of course, equipped with candles but again a comparison of the lighting at the bedhead leaves the Jacobsen solution ahead, with his ingenious tracked lighting offering more control than the new bedhead lights.

Bathrooms are generous thanks to the original layout and retain the feel of Jacobsen’s originals, although the mosaic tiles have largely been replaced with larger tiles and with marble on the floor, both making housekeeping easier. The colour scheme however remains true to the original, and it is interesting to compare the Jacobsen bathroom on Room 606 with the contemporary interpretation. The mosaic tiling of the floors in the original bathrooms adds a certain style that the contemporary ones miss.

In the suites the showers double as steam rooms, with multi headed shower units providing luxury body jets to enhance the showering experience. As with many modern luxury bathrooms, controls are electronic, and can be preset outside the shower to control both volume and temperature of water, before you enter the shower itself.

The corridors have been given a glass/mirror finish – apparently the original corridor schemes were an area where the Jacobsen magic didn’t work, being described to me as ‘dingy’ – certainly a complaint that cannot be levelled at the solution applied here. Happily the designer has created something visually exciting, although the lack of differentiation between floors when the lift doors open is a little disconcerting if the lift is full and the indicator panel obscured. Here the US trick of having a different visual ‘set piece’ outside the lift doors to key you to your floor would have worked very well.