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Ralf Thalén
NOBIS HOSPITALITY GROUP BUSINESS
DEVELOPMENT MANAGER
Ralf Thalén began his career in the travel business in Ibiza,
then started a restaurant with his wife in his native Sweden
and, for the last 15 years, he has been Business Developer
for the Nobis Hospitality Group. Nobis Hotel Copenhagen
is his seventh hotel. Hospitality has been the focus of his
entire working life. For him, the story and design of a hotel
are crucial, together with the cornerstones of service and
personality. Without these, he says, everything else
is irrelevant.
The design influences in the hotel are global and diverse.
The magical i-RAIN light cascading down from the
third-floor ceiling is French; the lounge area has Italian
influences; the antique lamps in the hallways are from
Finland and Norway. Thalén stresses, however, that he
likes interiors to represent the country you are in,
welcoming visitors not only to Copenhagen, but also the
beauty and clean expression of Danish design history.
In light of this, hotel guests are greeted by luxurious
constellations of Carl Hansen & Søn’s Embrace Chairs in
the impressive new Restaurant Niels. Other furnishings have
been specially designed to complement these supremely
comfortable chairs. Rooms invite distant daydreams in
sunlit CH25 Wegner lounge chairs and the largest, luxury
suite in the hotel has its very own Wegner CH338 dining
table surrounded by CH20 Elbow Chairs in natural oak.
Many pieces have been custom-made especially for the hotel:
rugs, desks, lamps, and there are a bounty of beautiful
anecdotes and details that may escape the casual viewer.
From the ‘stucco’ that have been painstakingly re-created
to blend in perfectly with the historic feel of the hotel to the
basement stairway railing beautifully hand-crafted by a
local blacksmith on site to perfectly match the original.
Throughout the 77-room hotel, the design team has chosen
mostly wood, marble and leather as key components of the
design as they are not only beautiful and natural materials,
but also extremely durable and age with dignity. This aging
is what Thalén calls “the last five percent” of any space.
It is what gives true atmosphere, charm and character.
