The one room we do not sell

This is my twelfth year as a Hotel General Manager and this career has brought me across continents and cultures exactly as I had hoped it would when my father sat me down in my very young years and advised me on which roads to follow and how best to navigate the world.

A large part of any hotelier's life is to maximise room occupancies and yields, to stay on target and deliver for all stakeholders. This means ensuring that we always aim for a full house, work with engineering to have the out of order rooms back in the system as fast as possible and as any colleagues and peers reading this understand only too well, 100% means everything.

But the Royal is a different hotel, different to any other that I have been fortunate enough to be involved with so far in life. You see at the Royal, we have one room that is never sold, Room 606.

Room 606, or the Arne Jacobsen Suite, is a time capsule from the 60's, a flashback to an era when life was simpler and dare it be said, maybe even more stylish than what we have become used to today. It's the only room we have at the Royal that is almost 100% original from when the hotel first opened on July 1st 1960 and has been written about and photographed in publications the world over from Tokyo to London to New York to Hong Kong.

It's a mecca for any student of design, architecture, history or mid-century modernism and tells the story of Arne Jacobsen's vision for the hotel puposefully yet with an understated simplicity that charms anyone who enters.

The colour palate of the room is an ode to the outside landscape of Copenhagen with the copper from the many church steeples of the city alongside the green areas of the capital echoed throughout the room, one of the many ways that Jacobsen took the natural environment and brought it inside into an urban one.

The room displays so many of his iconic pieces such as the Egg, Swan, 3300 Series and Drop chairs. It showcases his attention to detail from the bed design, wenge wood panelling, his understanding of light and its importance to all of us right down to the door handles, moulded perfectly to be aesthetically beautiful and functional for the guest.

Journalists and historians have written about Room 606 for years, it has spurred a book, numerous column inches and articles, been the setting for photoshoots and movie scenes and has over the years been a home away from home for guests from accross the globe.....until we closed it.

Today it remains as possibly the single most significant example of the full range of Arne Jacobsen's talents in one singular space. It's available to view for all guests of the hotel and for guided tours upon request for students of design, architecture or just those that are curious and want to learn a little about the why and the when of the hotel and its creator.

Stepping into the room, it's impossible not to feel an energy and experience design at every angle and we probably show the room at least ten times on a slow day.

So with all of this history, commercial attractiveness and significance to the Design Capital of the world, why on earth would we not sell this room?

I guess that the answer to that lies in protecting the past from the present. As hoteliers, we have a responsibility to deliver on rooms targets for sure, but not at all costs.

As historians, which everyone that works at the Royal is in some form or another, we have a responsibility towards the original creator, Arne.

And besides, who doesn't want what they can't have just that little bit more?