“We give the trees a gentle shake in the morning,” PÆRE Cocktail Bar’s beverage manager Raluca Giosanu explains. “It’s good for them,” she shrugs. The trees are part of 1 Hotel Copenhagen’s rustic but refined PÆRE Dining Room interior that’s scattered with foliage and framed by soaring, double-height ceilings that let the Nordic light pour in. And 1 Hotel Copenhagen’s PÆRE Cocktail Bar is gently shaking the city’s cocktail scene too, leading guests away from the safety of the classics into their menu of signature cocktails.
At the entrance, through the wide revolving door, a monumental timber staircase rises through a man-made rockery – there are elevators at the side in case the vertiginous climb is too intimidating – its steps flanked by boulders and trailing greenery, with a hand-forged brass balustrade curling upward like a vine.
Like ‘Wow!’
Rows of lantern-style candle holders line the treads, casting a warm, flickering glow that softens the raw stone and wood. It feels less like a hotel entrance than a woodland path leading somewhere ceremonial. “People get to the top of the stairs, and they’re like ‘wow!,'” Raluca agrees.
The lounge stretches out in layers of texture: bleached oak floors, welcoming low-slung armchairs in soft cream and taupe, and sofas arranged around driftwood-style coffee tables.
It’s an interior that plays deliberately with contrast: the polish of five-star hospitality set against the wildness of a forest floor, engineered right down to the morning ritual of shaking the trees awake.
It Looks Like A Dream
“In the summer, it looks like a dream,” Raluca says, thinking about Copenhagen, but about 1 Hotel Copenhagen’s PÆRE too. “And it smells like elderflowers and apples,” she smiles.
“It looks beautiful and fresh,” agrees Marco Grisafi, 1 Hotel Copenhagen’s director of bars. “And it tastes like a new generation is emerging and a new step of service.”
They make for a contrasting pair, Raluca and Marco. Romania-born Raluca, who has been in Copenhagen for ten years, fell into the industry straight out of high school, starting out at a Copenhagen tiki bar called Brass Monkey. “A place I will never forget,” she laughs. From there she moved to hotels, working front-of-house, “with 300 guests per night.”
Marco resisted for longer – his family had been in hospitality for years, and he’d seen firsthand how easily the job could swallow a social life. But when the drudgery of an office job wore him down, resistance gave way, and he found himself where he’d tried to avoid ending up.
Six months ago, he ended up in Copenhagen. “I arrived in the coldest winter for twenty years,” he widens his eyes. “Minus sixteen, one meter of snow.” Somehow, he fit right in. “I was super happy. I’d break into the biggest smile in the middle of the snow – I guess I like the cold.”
Luxury For Those That Know
Marco settled into Copenhagen’s cold with ease. 1 Hotel has that same easy-going, at-ease-with-its-surroundings nature.
The reclaimed wood and living plants hint at a whole ethos, where sustainability is in its DNA and the energy is unhurried and a little bohemian, a bit like Raluca and Marco – but there’s real polish under the raw materials and real intention behind the ‘just-woken-up’ looseness. It’s luxury for people who know that it means connecting to nature, wellness, and having a quietly good conscience in a city where bikes outnumber cars in the streets, and where 35,000 of them can pass a single corner by four in the afternoon.
That same looseness runs right through to who they hire. “During my interview call they said, ‘Marco, first thing we have to tell you…” he pauses for emphasis, “is that you can keep the beard and show your tattoos,'” he nods. “Thank you!” he replied – part of what he describes as feeling like family from that moment on, first at 1 Hotel Mayfair.
A Nature-Led Nordic Landmark
Raluca’s welcome was different: she was part of the opening team, watching the building’s whole transformation. The modernist landmark in Copenhagen’s Latin Quarter, designed by architect Vilhelm Lauritzen and built in 1933 as the Daells Varehus department store, became 1 Hotel Copenhagen – the brand’s nature-led Nordic landmark.
She’s had a little longer here to understand 1 Hotel’s consumers. Already, in the late afternoon, it’s a mix – hotel guests sinking into the sofas after a day exploring the city, small clusters of colleagues debriefing over the bar, a scattering of laptops still out that will disappear the moment the first round of Nordic berry gimlets arrives.
Menu design is where the two of them agree completely. “People look at a menu, and if it’s too overcomplicated, they just get a classic instead,” Marco says. It’s a familiar bar problem – ambition on the page pushing guests back towards what they already trust.
PÆRE Cocktail Bar Is Doing Something Different And New
Raluca’s answer is that it’s partly the naming. Take the Nordic berry gimlet. Gimlet is a name every guest already trusts. Berry is a flavor nobody needs explaining. Nordic is the twist – local, but not so local it needs a translation. “You put together things people will recognize, but it’s also different and new,” she says. It’s a small trick, repeated across the whole menu, and it’s the reason guests order the signatures instead of retreating to a martini.
The clearest example sits at the top of the list: the PÆRE Signature. Boatyard Vodka, B Corp certified, forms the base. Into it goes a pear cordial made in-house from Danish pears and acid, then a syrup of sea buckthorn and vanilla – sea buckthorn being a tart, orange Nordic berry that has quietly become the bar’s signature ingredient. A pear liqueur rounds it out. The whole thing is clarified, then finished with a single slice of dehydrated pear. It comes out looking almost weightless. It is, Raluca says, “beautiful, fruity, fresh and crisp” – and it is also, in miniature, the whole PÆRE philosophy: local ingredients, global technique, nothing wasted.
1 Hotel’s trick is repeating the same idea in different accents – Marco’s unshakeable Italian-English, Raluca’s gentle blend of Eastern European and Scandinavian. Same idea, different voice. “We all have the same purpose, but each property showcases it in its own local way,” Marco says. Miami does it one way, London another, Tokyo another again.
Doing It Anyway
In Copenhagen, that means Danish pears and sea buckthorn instead of anything imported for the sake of it. It means bikes outside instead of taxis. And it means three trees growing indoors, under a roof.
Every morning, someone shakes them. Not for the guests, but for the trees. It’s the same instinct behind the menu: at PÆRE Copenhagen they don’t give people the easy classic they might order, they give them something better that’s easy to understand. Nobody’s asking PÆRE to shake up the city’s cocktail scene. Raluca, Marco and the team are doing it anyway.
