The Building

Kielberg Advokater has its offices in Brandt's villa. This is part of the story of this house.

In 1895 the manufacturer Søren Chr. Brandt, his wife Oluffa and their children moved into the new house on Hunderupvej with numerous servants. Søren Brandt was a prosperous man, as the house testifies. He ran the cloth mill Brandts Klædefabrik. Its buildings are now Odense's internationally known cultural centre but at that time it was one of the city's biggest companies. The villa was designed by Jens Vilhelm Dahlerup, a renowned architect of the time. He also designed the Royal Theatre and the Pantomime Theatre in Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. A keen observer will find details in the villa that can be found in both the above buildings. The buildings are otherwise beyond compare, of course.

The architect and owner actually intended to build the house on Næsby Slotsbanke (Næsby Castle Hill), where it would certainly have looked stately with its corner towers and spires, but the area proved unsuitable and perhaps there was already enough respect for ancient monuments at that time that even Søren Brandt had to give up this plan.

Instead the house was built on a large site by Hunderupvej on an artificial mound to replace the castle hill, far outside Odense as it was then. A park was laid out around the house. Today it has beautiful trees, a shady copper beech, a laciniate lime which traditionally always blossoms on 6 June and has an exquisitely subtle scent during its short flowering season and a lime in front of the front steps in the style of all the best castles. And there should of course have been peacocks roaming the park.

The front steps lead up to the hall, a beautiful room with natural light streaming in via a large skylight. The sweeping staircase leads up to the first floor, where there were previously bedrooms, children's rooms, guest rooms, maid's rooms and bathrooms, plus a flushing toilet, which was something quite unique at the time. The water for the taps and toilet came from the house's own well. It had to be carried up to the attic in buckets and poured into a large wooden tank which is still there in the attic. A lot of water was required and it was hard work to carry the water up, but the family employed people to do this.

The most elegant room in the house was the dining room. It was huge with a frieze, showing a wild boar hunt, that has been preserved. At one end of the room is a bay window that had the largest uninterrupted expanse of glass in the whole of Odense, including the display windows of the city's shops.

On the ground floor were the study, the garden room and the drawing room, a suite of rooms with sliding doors between them. There were dark panels on the walls of the study and an elegant wooden ceiling. This appears to be of oak but is actually simple pine, skilfully painted so that it is virtually indistinguishable from oak. Painters today are full of admiration for their predecessors' skill. In the other two rooms, there were fine floral friezes on the top part of the wall just under the stucco ceilings.

The ground floor also housed the kitchen, the butler's pantry, the linen room and the silver room. At the back was the basement with a washhouse, ironing room and mangle room, a red wine cellar and a white wine cellar and the coal-fired boiler, which provided central heating for the house, just as rare a phenomenon as the flushing toilet.

The imposing house also had a stable. This was built at a suitable distance from the house to keep the smell and the flies away. Finally, there was also a coachman's house, a modest house in yellow stone which is just inside the gate, a pair of heavy granite posts a metre high with large wrought-iron gates. The coachman's house did not have a flushing toilet. There was a privy in the yard.
Søren Brandt was only able to enjoy his new house for a short time. He died in 1905. His wife Oluffa lived in the big house as a widow for 40 years. In her time the house gained a further attraction, a lift that could take her up to the first floor and down to the basement. No other villa in the city had a lift.

Given the times, Oluffa might have been expected to live a quiet, withdrawn life as a widow. However, she was the head of the family. She led an extensive social life. She held dinner parties and garden parties. She was charitable and, consistent with her station, she travelled through the city in a coach with two teams of horses and a coachman on the box until she bought a car made by Thriges fabrikker, when the coachman became a chauffeur and the stable a garage. During the Second World War, the car was put on blocks, the coach was taken out and the chauffeur became a coachman. He would hitch the horses to the coach and drive his mistress out, for example to Thomas Kingo Church around the corner on a Sunday, wait and drive her home again.

If you are in the house in the evening and are in a sentimental mood, you can hear sounds that conjure up the life that was once lived in this unusual home. The light, busy footsteps of the servants, the distant voices of dinner guests, the clink of glass and china and the thin sound of a knife striking a crystal glass, stillness and then Oluffa's dinner partner thanking her for dinner and complimenting her on her charm, talent and splendid abilities as a hostess, followed by the clink of glasses and voices, and much later the steps of the servants again, not so light and busy now, but heavy and tired.

Oluffa Brandt died in 1945 and her daughter and son-in-law moved into the house. Her son-in-law, the manufacturer Aage Mengel, was the Managing Director of Brandts Klædefabrik, and the house remained the stately setting for the life of one family. However, Aage Mengel died in 1971 and the house was sold to Landinspektørfirmaet Hübbe & Thorlacius, a firm of land surveyors, which operated in the house without major conversions until 1988. But the stable and a large plot of land had been sold, another plot was parcelled out and an area was turned into a car park. The garden was still big but no longer warranted the name park.

Kielberg Advokater took over the house in 1988 and gently modernised the interior. The Odense architect Sten Frederiksen handled this modernisation very successfully. He managed to make the rooms usable as offices, while preserving the very special atmosphere of the house. The house is therefore an unusual workplace and we wanted to tell its story here.

However, the story does not end there! In 2002 space became too limited. One of the leading firms of architects in Denmark proposed a house made of glass built parallel to the existing house. The proposal, immediately dubbed the "combined heat and power station", was not received with enthusiasm. Fortunately, the architect Poul Ingemann came up with a very different proposal. Poul Ingemann is known for projects including the beautiful extensions to the Johannes Larsen Museum in Kerteminde, and he demonstrated his fine ability to add something new to something valuable and old when he proposed that the extension be buried! This proposal was accepted and the extension was built with large light openings facing a beautiful atrium courtyard. The 800 m2 extension cannot be seen from the surrounding roads. The old house rears up untouched on its "castle hill", but, underneath all the greenery, we who work in the house enjoy spacious offices in a modern extension. Great credit for this is also due to Poul Ingemann's partner architect Carl Ove Dydensborg and the main contractor Hansson & Knudsen A/S.