Hotel Continental

Caroline Boman Hansen was 32 when she and her husband Christian took over a new hotel and café on Stortingsgaten in 1900, across the street from the National Theatre that had opened the year before. Christian died soon afterwards and Caroline ran Hotel Continental for the next half-century, buying the building and extending it. Her daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter followed her, and the hotel in central Oslo is still owned and run by the fourth generation of the same family, which is rare for a five-star house in any European capital.

History

The building went up in 1900 as a café with rooms above, in the years when Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, was laying out its new theatre district beside the Royal Palace park. Theatercaféen on the ground floor was modelled on the coffee houses of Vienna and quickly became the meeting place of the actors, writers and painters who worked across the road. Caroline Boman Hansen bought the freehold in 1908 and added floors and bedrooms through the 1910s and 1920s, so that the house grew from a café with a few rooms into a full hotel.

The family's collection of Edvard Munch's lithographs and woodcuts was assembled over decades and hangs in Dagligstuen, the hotel bar, where guests drink beneath the Madonna and The Sick Child. The hotel joined Leading Hotels of the World and is the only member in Oslo still in family hands. Elisabeth C. Brochmann, Caroline's great-granddaughter, leads it now.

Architecture and design

The corner building on Stortingsgaten has a pale stone and stucco front with the rounded bays and ironwork of the Jugendstil years, and it is listed by the Norwegian heritage authorities. Theatercaféen keeps its original plan: a long high room with a gallery for musicians at one end, where a string ensemble still plays in the evening, and walls lined with drawn portraits of the Norwegian artists, actors and writers who have been regulars over 120 years. The bedrooms above have been renovated in stages in a quiet Scandinavian manner, with oak, wool and pale walls.

Rooms and suites

The hotel has 151 rooms, including five suites. Rooms on the Stortingsgaten side look across to the National Theatre and the trees of the palace park; those on the inner side are quieter. The suites on the upper floors are the largest in the house, and the top-floor rooms have the views towards the fjord.

Dining

Theatercaféen is the reason many visitors come. It serves Norwegian and continental dishes through the day, its own cakes in the afternoon and a late supper after the theatre, with the balcony musicians playing above the room. Dagligstuen, the bar with the Munch prints, serves cocktails and light food until late. The hotel's first-floor restaurant has changed name and chef several times over the past two decades and current arrangements should be checked.

Weddings and events

The hotel hosts weddings, dinners and meetings in its banqueting rooms on the upper floors, and takes over Theatercaféen for larger private receptions outside opening hours. The rooms are used by Oslo's institutions for anniversaries and by companies for board meetings; capacities are not published widely and are best confirmed with the hotel.

Location

Stortingsgaten runs parallel to Karl Johans gate, Oslo's main street, between the Parliament and the Royal Palace. Nationaltheatret station is beneath the square opposite, with the airport express to Oslo Gardermoen in about twenty minutes and the metro to the rest of the city. The National Theatre is across the road, the Palace park a minute away and Aker Brygge and the fjord five minutes downhill. Among luxury hotels in Oslo it holds the most central ground, and it has held it since 1900.