Villa Copenhagen

The Central Post & Telegraph Head Office was built in 1912 with central heating and what seemed an excessive number of toilets, and was nicknamed Toilet Castle for it. Heinrich Wenck, who also designed Central Station, the building it stands directly behind, gave it a Neo-Baroque front of red brick and sandstone reliefs, which has had to carry the name ever since. For a century it was the headquarters of the Danish post. In 2020 it opened as a hotel of 390 rooms, gutted behind the facade, its new windows and roof made to look like the old ones. Breakfast is in the old sorting room, with Rug Bakery's sourdough. Over the bar in the glass-roofed courtyard hangs a bronze head with a finger to its lips. The reason to book is on the building's only flat roof: a 25-metre lap pool kept at 28 to 30°C all year on heat recovered from the hotel's ventilation and cooling, steaming beside brick dormers and yellow-striped parasols, with Tivoli across the street.

Recommended for a city break with a swim at each end of the day, and for families with one child of twelve or under: the Family room takes two adults and a child, and children have the pool until seven in the evening. It is for hotel guests only, open from seven to eleven in the morning and from three to ten at night. Check-in is also at three, which settles what to do first. Tivoli is four minutes' walk across the road, and for the rest of the city the concierge hires out bikes and books canal boat tours. On Friday and Saturday nights DJs play the courtyard, under the bronze head, which goes on asking for quiet.