The history of Bakkehuset

The Story of Bakkehuset

 

Bakkehuset has roots going back to the 1620s, and parts of the present building are considered to be the oldest surviving in Frederiksberg. The name refers to the location of the house on Valby Bakke, Valby Hill, which is the highest in the Copenhagen area. Bakkehuset originally belonged to the Copenhagen Workhouse, which supplied farm products to Copenhagen Castle. However, it quickly developed into a hostelry and wayside inn, as the main road from Roskilde in those days went through Valby and right past Bakkehuset and on into Copenhagen. For many years, the house was a farm standing on its own and with four wings built around a square.

 

In the middle of the 18th century the house was owned by the country’s prime minister, Count Johan Ludvig Holstein, who was the originator of the idea of moving the main road so that it went past Frederiksberg Castle on Valby Bakke and continued to Vesterbrogade and in towards the city. Moving the road meant that it was not subsequently possible to run Bakkehuset as an inn, and instead it was let out to summer visitors as single rooms and small apartments. It was just as a summer visitor that Knud Lyne Rahbek had lived in the house before choosing to settle there permanently in 1787.

 

In 1798, Knud Lyne Rahbek married Kamma Heger, and in 1802 they bought the house and moved from the small apartment on the first floor of the south wing into the large ground floor apartment in the east wing, where the memorial rooms and museum have now been established. Read more on Knud Lyne and Kamma Rahbek. They continued to let the rest of the house, and Kamma Rahbek designed the rest of the seven acres of land as a romantic park. The Rahbeks lived in Bakkehuset until their deaths in 1829 and 1830 respectively. See pictures from the museum and read about the way in which the apartment was arranged at the time of the Rahbeks.

 

Bakkehuset continued to be let out to summer visitors from Copenhagen after the Rahbeks’ time. Thus for instance the historian Troels-Lund, the poet and critic Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the actress Johanne Luise Heiberg and also the poet N.F.S. Grundtvig lived in the house at various times in the 1840s. In 1855 it was bought by the Committee for the Establishment of an Asylum for Idiot, Weak-Minded and Epileptic Children, which built the larger neighbouring house and for periods used the old Bakkehus, for instance, as residences for the staff.

 

The asylum was moved from Bakkehuset shortly before 1900. The two remaining wings were in a very poor state of repair, so that an exhibition of relics from literary history was arranged in 1903 in an effort to re-awaken interest in Bakkehuset. The house was nevertheless threatened with demolition. So a committee was set up with the object of acquiring and repairing the buildings in order to establish memorial rooms for the Rahbeks and the circle of important figures who had frequented the house. Read more about the circle of friends.

 

Support from public and private sources made it possible to rent the main wing and here in 1925 to open the Rahbek Memorial Rooms. Then, in 1935, both wings and a small remainder of the garden were bought and donated to Frederiksberg Municipality by the historian Louis Bobé and his wife. Tove Clemmensen, a curator in the National Museum, restored Bakkehuset in the 1950s on the basis of information from the time of the Rahbeks. Thus, the interior with its furnishings, the colour of the walls and the hanging of the curtains provides an authentic and atmospheric impression of how life was in Bakkehuset at the beginning of the 19th century. Read more about the museum.