Our History

Before there was a merchant's house, there was herring. Svaneke grew as herring fishing in the Baltic Sea peaked, and in 1475 the small town by the cove was granted market town rights. The name is known from 1410 as Swencke, the swan cove. Along the water, where the hotel stands today, a few small farms were situated in the 16th century, where people both fished and farmed the land. They were not grand, but the location was unbeatable: right by the landing stage where the boats came in with their catch, and where all traffic in and out of the town passed by. It is this location that all subsequent owners have built upon.

In the 17th century, the small farms by the harbour grew into proper merchants’ houses, and the middle one came into the hands of Poul Madsen Kofoed: a merchant, mayor of Svaneke and, by all accounts, the richest man on the entire island. In 1665, the castellan of Hammershus held a betrothal feast at the castle for Kofoed and his bride, Magdalene Margrethe Hesler, the castellan's own niece. After Kofoed's death, she married the island's high court judge, Ancher Anthoni Müller, who moved into the merchant's house. Three of the most powerful names on Bornholm, one address. Even then, the house by the harbour was the place to be.

Bornholm had a privilege that the rest of the kingdom could only envy: the distillation of spirits was unrestricted. This led to a huge production on the island, and around the year 1800, much of it was shipped across the water to Sweden. Merchant Jeppe Holst, who established his business in Svaneke in 1806 and operated from the courtyard by the harbour, held shares in the ships that exported the spirits. They returned laden with tar and timber. Farmers from the surrounding area paid for their goods with grain and hides, the grain was turned into spirits, and the spirits were traded for timber. A merchant's yard was a small economy in its own right, and the yard by the harbour was its engine room.

When the English bombarded Copenhagen in 1807 and seized the Danish fleet, the king struck back in the only way he could: he issued letters of marque, authorising private citizens to capture enemy ships. Jeppe Holst entered into a partnership and equipped a small, fast cutter, the Den virksomme Svane, with two cannons and a crew armed with pistols, rifles and sabres. It worked. Several English merchant ships were captured and sold at auction, and privateering became one of Bornholm's main sources of income during the war. The English were not amused: in 1808, three frigates spent five hours bombarding Christiansø. The cannon battery at Svaneke Røgeri dates from these anxious years.

Svaneke had a problem that no amount of prize money could hide: the harbour was too small and too shallow for anything but fishing boats. Jeppe Holst decided to do something about it. For about ten years, he championed the cause, and when the town's coffers were empty, he paid for it himself while workers blasted and carved a deeper basin out of the hard gneiss. The harbour was completed around 1816, and by 1814 the king had already made Holst a Dannebrogsmand. Now, larger ships could moor right outside his courtyard. The merchant who sold spirits to Sweden and brought back tar and timber had quite literally built his own front door.

In the summer of 1824, Prince Christian, later Christian VIII, travelled around Bornholm keeping a diary. In Svaneke, he noted that the harbour had been improved by ‘appropriate work largely thanks to the citizen Dannebrogsmand Holst’. Holst then showed him the house. In the backyard, the prince wrote, he saw ‘the low-ceilinged room in which King Christian V, according to tradition, is said to have dined on 8 May 1687’. The prince's diary is the oldest written evidence that the royal tale was associated with this particular house, and that the Holst family was already telling it to visitors back then. You can almost see the merchant standing in the doorway, ducking his head for the low beam.

On 7 March 1827, Jeppe Holst died, only 52 years old and a very wealthy man. He left his wife Anne Marie, his daughter Margrethe Marie, his son Ole Nicolaj and three small graves north of Svaneke Church, where three sons who died in childhood were buried; a fourth son followed in 1835. His gravestone, a classical stele with marble tablets, still stands in the middle of the family plot. The widow continued the business with her son, and in 1836 Ole Nicolaj obtained his own trade licence and took over the farm on the main square, which is now called Søllingsgaard. His mother remained at the harbour. This division is the reason why the Holst family name is now associated with the main square and not the harbour front.

After Jeppe Holst's death, the widow Anne Marie Kofoed was the best match on the entire east coast: a thriving merchant's house, ships, land and a fortune. She chose the young man who already lived under her roof. Johan Christian Pingel Siemsen, born in 1802 and probably from a Lübeck merchant family living in Rønne, was employed as a tutor for her youngest son. In 1831, the tutor, nineteen years her junior, became her husband. The town did what towns do, and renamed the house after him: Siemsena Gårinj, Siemsens Gaard in the Bornholm dialect. The name has stuck ever since.

Siemsen was no lazy stepfather. He continued to run the farm as a fully-fledged merchant's house, became the Prussian consul in Svaneke and took on the duties of churchwarden. When the church underwent major repairs in 1836 with a new roof, a vaulted ceiling, new windows and doors, pulpits, pews and a complete repaint, it was Siemsen the merchant who was in charge. The result was unmistakable. When Bishop Mynster came to visit in 1841, he wrote in his diary about Svaneke Church: ‘it has recently undergone major repairs, and is now very beautiful and tasteful’. The tutor from Rønne had become one of the pillars of the town.

The fire insurance valuations from Siemsen's time offer a rare glimpse inside the house. In 1847, the front house facing Havnebryggen was a six-bay oak timber-framed building with wattle and daub walls, a thatched roof, and timber gables. Inside, there was a horse mill: a wooden structure with gears, turned by horses walking in a circle, which ground the grain brought by farmers as payment for their goods. Ten years later, in 1857, the thatched roof had been replaced with tiles and the gables were bricked up, but the millwork was still there, designed to be turned by horses. Where guests eat breakfast today, horses once trotted round and round.

Siemsen died in 1863, and the farm was bought by the brothers Mogens and Christian Smidt, who were building what the town archive calls the 'merchant empire' in Svaneke. Between 1859 and 1869, Henrik Hansen's shipyard in Svaneke launched ship after ship for them: the sloops Sostrata and Tre Sønner, the schooner Sølling, and two schooner-brigs, Edouard Suenson and Skjalm Hvide. The photograph of the brand new Skjalm Hvide in Svaneke Harbour from 1868 is one of the oldest pictures of the town, and Edouard Suenson was later photographed off St. Mark's Square in Venice. For eight years, ships were operated to the Mediterranean from the house on Havnebryggen.

On the night of 30 December 1904, the Baltic Sea rose up against Svaneke. In the morning, fishing boats lay thrown up on the quay along Havnebryggen, and Albert Jeppesen's boat, Odin, was reportedly hurled over the breakwater. The town's photographer, Valdemar Myhre, went out with his camera and captured the destruction on glass plates. A few years later, shortly after 1912, he stood on Havnebryggen again and photographed the three large merchant houses facing the harbour, with Siemsens Gaard in the middle and electric street lighting in front. It is one of the last pictures of the farm with all four wings, before it was to change forever.

The railway arrived on Bornholm around 1900, and the harbour trade slowly dwindled. A farm built to store grain for an entire surrounding area was suddenly far too large for a shop. In the 1930s, the owners did something brave: they converted the old merchant's house into a hotel, and in 1934 they tore down the fourth wing, the one that had stood between the courtyard and the sea for as long as anyone could remember. Overnight, the enclosed, inward-facing courtyard became an open garden with the Baltic Sea as its backdrop. This is the most important decision in the building's recent history. Every single view from the terrace is thanks to what happened in 1934.

In 1971, Tenna and Will Ipsen bought Siemsens Gaard. They were already running the adjacent Hotel Østersøen and began a long and loving renovation. Their sons Jens and Henrik took over in 1986, with Jens running it alone from 2012, and for half a century, the house was simply the town's hotel. In 2021, after fifty years, the family sold it to August Lund and Dines Dueholm, who own the house today. On 1 February 2026, Mathias Smed and Christina Ivang took over the management of the hotel and restaurant, the latest in a line that runs from a mayor and a high court judge to a privateer, a tutor and two ship-owning brothers. Four hundred years on, the house still stands.