Queen Margrethe’s breakfast room, diamond signatures, royal gardens and a quiet walk to Lake Esrum — a summer afternoon inside Fredensborg Palace, Danish royal home still in use.
The local train from Helsingør took about half an hour to reach Fredensborg, and the moment I stepped off I checked whether I had made a mistake. The station seemed almost comically modest for a town built around one of Denmark’s principal royal residences. I checked the name once, then again, before some unusually helpful signs reassured me that I had indeed arrived where I intended to be.
Had I come directly from Copenhagen, the journey would have been slightly more complicated. Fredensborg lies roughly forty kilometres from the capital by road, and the usual rail route involved taking the S-train to Hillerød and changing there for the Lille Nord local line, a journey of around an hour. I had already spent the first part of the day in Helsingør, at the other end of the same local railway, so Fredensborg was an easy continuation rather than a separate excursion.
The signs from the station led through the centre of town and what appeared to be its main shopping street. Ten minutes later I reached the entrance to the palace complex, where a member of the Royal Life Guards marched back and forth in his steady rhythm while displaying no detectable interest in my arrival.
After Kronborg earlier that day, the contrast was considerable. Helsingør had given me Hamlet, fortifications, cannons and centuries of strategic importance. Fredensborg was going to give me something more intimate: permission, for a couple of hours, to look inside a palace that was not merely preserving the life of former monarchs but was still part of the everyday life of the then-reigning Queen.
Coming from a republic, I have always found that slightly exotic. For Danes, the monarchy was part of ordinary national life; for me, the idea that a woman could be head of state and also have a favourite room in which to spend her evenings remained inherently interesting. Queen Margrethe II was enormously popular, and by 2021 had been on the throne for almost half a century. Fredensborg was closely associated with her spring and autumn residence and served not only for family occasions but also receptions, state visits and events of international importance.
The parallel that came to mind was Windsor. Not because the two palaces look particularly alike, but because both combine a monumental royal setting outside the capital with the slightly strange fact that behind all the ceremony there are rooms in which a real family actually lives. In summer Margrethe generally moved to residences such as Marselisborg and Gråsten, making it possible to open parts of Fredensborg to the public.
That was my opportunity.
Inside Fredensborg Palace: When a Palace Is Still Somebody's Home
There is an unavoidable element of voyeurism in walking through the living rooms of a living queen, and Fredensborg did surprisingly little to disguise it.
The palace interior could only be visited on an organised tour, offered in Danish and English. Without a ticket, visitors could explore the Octagon in front of the palace and the publicly accessible sections of the gardens, but the doors to the inhabited part remained firmly closed. The tour cost roughly the equivalent of a hundred Croatian kuna at the time, and signs led from the entrance towards the ticket point, where a few benches provided somewhere to wait.
What I remember more clearly than the price was the staff. Everyone involved was exceptionally friendly and seemed genuinely interested in making the tour both pleasant and informative. Perhaps that was easier because there were so few of us: one Danish-English family researching its Danish roots, a British man working in Denmark, and me.
The tour began in the courtyard with some basic information about the palace and a reminder that this was the Queen’s home. We were therefore asked to refrain from photography. The guide supported the request with a reasonable question: how would we feel if hordes of tourists walked through our homes taking photographs?
It was difficult to argue with that.
The friendly appeal was followed by a rather firmer explanation that photography would, in fact, be strictly sanctioned. Phones were checked to make sure they had been switched off, and larger cameras had to be left behind before entering the palace. What had initially sounded like Scandinavian trust quickly acquired a sensible backup system.
Once inside, another curator took over. She specialised in the palace interiors, knew an intimidating amount about both Fredensborg and the Royal Family, and made the excellent decision not to turn the visit into a catalogue of furniture and dates. Instead, she organised much of the tour around the way Queen Margrethe actually used the rooms.
We saw the room in which she liked to spend her evenings and another where she had breakfast with her ladies-in-waiting. Other rooms belonged more clearly to the ceremonial side of monarchy, including one where she received foreign ambassadors. That mixture was what made Fredensborg different from most palaces I had visited. One moment we were discussing diplomacy and heads of state; the next we were being shown where the Queen ate breakfast.
In Versailles, Schönbrunn or any number of other great European palaces, a bedroom may be arranged perfectly, but the person who slept there has been dead for centuries. Fredensborg did not need to reconstruct anybody’s domestic life. The owner could come back.
The photography ban suddenly seemed considerably less eccentric.
Presidents in the windows
One of the stranger traces left by Fredensborg’s distinguished visitors could be found on the windows.
For generations, members of royal families and visiting heads of state have signed panes of glass with a diamond. The oldest dated inscription goes back to 1841, and the practice became particularly associated with the great royal gatherings at Fredensborg in the nineteenth century. In modern times the procedure has become a little more controlled: guests sign separate pieces of glass that can then be preserved rather than being encouraged to attack whichever palace window happens to be nearest.
We saw several of these inscriptions. Many came from members of interconnected European royal families, but among the more recent names I recognised was Bill Clinton, who visited Denmark while president of the United States. There was something wonderfully odd about finding the signatures of kings and presidents scratched into glass like an exceptionally exclusive form of graffiti.
From there we entered one of the palace’s most impressive spaces, the Dome Hall. Its floor is a square roughly fifteen metres on each side, but the room rises twenty-seven metres through two storeys before ending in the vaulted dome above. Tall windows with red-painted frames and the lantern above bring daylight into what could otherwise have been a heavy ceremonial room. Receptions, celebrations and important royal occasions are held here, and its position at the centre of the palace makes the architecture feel as deliberate as the events staged inside it.
Our curator, however, directed our attention away from the dome and towards the black-and-white floor.
We were supposed to find a mistake.
It did not take particularly long. One element breaks the otherwise regular pattern, but the error was intentional. Frederik IV had deliberately ordered an imperfection because human craftsmanship should not attempt to challenge the only true source of perfection: God.
Our curator then added the line that made the story worth remembering. Perhaps the faulty tile had worked. Unlike many European palaces, Fredensborg had never been destroyed by fire.
I am not qualified to judge deliberate imperfection as a fire-prevention strategy, but it certainly produced a better story than another perfectly laid tile would have.
A royal solution to long sermons
After the main palace we continued to Fredensborg Palace Church, completed in 1726 as part of the early development of the complex. The interior was comparatively restrained for a royal church, with the altar and pulpit providing the principal historical decoration, although the ceiling acquired a very different focal point in 2006 when a monumental painting by Per Kirkeby, measuring approximately 8.5 by 3.5 metres, was installed.
The chapel was not reserved exclusively for royalty. It had hosted royal weddings, baptisms and confirmations, but Queen Margrethe maintained the longstanding tradition of also making it available to the local community. Public services were held there on most Sundays, making this another place where the boundary between royal residence and ordinary Fredensborg became surprisingly thin.
The object I liked most was not particularly royal at all.
Opposite the pulpit was a set of four hourglasses showing one, two, three and four quarters of an hour. Their function was brutally practical: whoever was preaching could see exactly how long he had been talking and, ideally, avoid exceeding an hour.
Almost three centuries before PowerPoint introduced presenters to the countdown timer, Fredensborg had already solved the problem.
The seating arrangement revealed that even monarchs had their priorities. The original royal pew stood in the northeastern corner of the church because it provided the best view of the pulpit. Frederik IV had a new royal pew installed in the western part of the church as early as 1728. Above it stands the organ built by Marcussen & Reuter in 1846.
From royal spectacle to royal vegetables
The palace gardens cover roughly 120 hectares. Their Baroque structure was built around seven avenues radiating from the palace in a fan, tying the building to the surrounding hunting landscape. By the nineteenth century fashions had changed: much of the strict geometry was softened, formal avenues gave way to a more English-romantic network of winding paths, while the great central axis of Brede Allé remained a defining element.
The gardens were extensively restored beginning in 2009. Ageing avenue trees were replaced, major elements of the Baroque layout were recreated, and sculptures and monuments were either restored or carved again. Brede Allé reopened after restoration in 2013.
Among the sculptures, the strangest ensemble is Nordmandsdalen, the Valley of the Norsemen. Seventy figures represent ordinary people from Norway and the Faroe Islands — mostly farmers, fishermen and other working people — rendered in regional dress and arranged inside a royal landscape. Sixty represent Norwegians and ten Faroese. After spending the previous hour surrounded by queens, ambassadors and presidents, finding fishermen and farmers immortalised in sandstone provided a useful change of company.
Much of the public garden can be explored without joining a tour. The part I found most interesting could not.
During the summer opening we were taken into the private gardens immediately beside the palace. They had developed from the private garden established under Frederik V and felt quite different from the grand Baroque landscape outside. Instead of long ceremonial axes, there were quieter spaces decorated with columns, urns and carefully maintained planting. It felt less like a representation of monarchy and more like a garden designed for people who intended to use it.
The kitchen garden made that distinction even clearer. Various crops grown there were destined for the Royal Family’s table, while another section produced flowers used to decorate the palace. After the Dome Hall, guards, visiting presidents and diplomatic receptions, there was something pleasingly ordinary about discovering that somebody still had to grow vegetables for dinner and decide which flowers should go inside.
The modern orangery beside the kitchen garden dates from 1995. Delicate plants spend the winter there, flowers are produced for decorating the palace, and the building was designed to provide different climatic conditions for different types of plants. Our curator was particularly enthusiastic about how technically advanced it was. An orangery may sound romantic; maintaining several hundred plants through a Danish winter apparently requires rather more than romance.
She also emphasised that gardening had long been taken seriously by the Danish Royal Family. Queen Ingrid, Margrethe’s mother, had made a particularly important contribution to the appearance of the private gardens. The interest was therefore not simply historical landscaping imposed around a monument; it was something successive generations of the family had actively continued.
Once the official tour ended, I had no particular desire to rush back to Copenhagen. Instead, I followed the path towards Lake Esrum.
A lake with nothing much happening
The path ran along the edge of the palace grounds beneath rows of trees and provided exactly the sort of walk I needed after several hours of concentrating on kings, queens, architecture and horticulture. Fredensborg Palace occupies the southeastern side of Lake Esrum, and the lake itself is impressive by Danish standards: with about 17.3 square kilometres of surface it is the country’s second largest by area, while its approximately 233 million cubic metres of water make it Denmark’s largest lake by volume.
Those numbers sound much more dramatic than my actual experience beside it.
Nothing spectacular was happening. There was no landmark demanding another photograph, no attraction left to tick off, and no compelling reason to do anything at all. It was simply quiet, green and idyllic, so I sat there for a while and enjoyed the absence of an itinerary.
There was a very pleasant-looking restaurant on the shore, but I had arrived too early for dinner. Eventually I headed back through the palace grounds and towards the little railway station whose existence I had doubted a few hours earlier.
Around ninety minutes later I was sitting in the Moxy in Copenhagen, which was my base for exploring Denmark, drinking an excellent cocktail. Earlier that same day I had walked through Hamlet’s castle in Helsingør; by afternoon I had seen where the Queen of Denmark ate breakfast, inspected presidential signatures scratched into glass, found an intentionally defective royal floor and discovered that eighteenth-century Denmark had already invented a mechanism for telling a preacher when to shut up.
The cocktail seemed an entirely appropriate way to return to republican life.
The Backstory, If You Want It: Three Centuries of Fredensborg
Fredensborg began not as a grand administrative palace but as an escape from one. Frederik IV wanted a country residence where court life could be more relaxed and where hunting and entertainment mattered more than the daily machinery of government. Construction began in 1719 under architect Johan Cornelius Krieger, the main building came into use in 1722, and the Palace Church was completed four years later. My old notes simply described Fredensborg as having been built in 1726; the reality was a process rather than a single date.
The inspiration was genuinely international. Frederik had travelled through Italy as a young prince in 1692–93, spending about fourteen months abroad, and returned again in 1708–09 travelling incognito under the title Count of Oldenburg. “Incognito” did not mean that he successfully fooled European courts into thinking he was an obscure German count; it was largely a way of escaping some of the suffocating ceremonial that accompanied an official royal journey.
Those travels exposed him to the villas and pleasure residences of Italy and France. Anyone who has seen the villas around the lakes of northern Italy can understand the temptation to bring some of that atmosphere home, and the wooded shore of Lake Esrum offered a convincing Danish substitute.
The new residence also acquired a politically resonant name. Fredensborg means, approximately, the Castle or Palace of Peace. In 1720 Denmark-Norway and Sweden signed the Treaty of Frederiksborg, ending the war between those two kingdoms. My original text went too far in saying that the treaty ended the Great Northern War itself: the wider conflict continued until the Treaty of Nystad in 1721. For Denmark, however, the peace was significant enough for Frederik’s new country residence to commemorate it permanently.
The earliest palace was much more compact than the complex I visited in 2021. A roughly square central building stood on a paved terrace at the centre of what was known as a hunting star: straight routes radiated through the landscape so that hunters had open lines of sight. In front was an octagonal courtyard surrounded by low wings for servants, while stables and a riding area lay to the east. The growing complex also included the Palace Church, an orangery and the building traditionally known as the Margrave House, used by courtiers and officials.
Fredensborg then spent much of the eighteenth century refusing to remain finished. During the first half of the century the main building was enlarged and acquired the form recognisable today, including its corner pavilions with pyramidal roofs. The original orangery was converted into accommodation for ladies-in-waiting. The Chancellery House was built in 1731 to provide offices and accommodation for officials when the monarch was at Fredensborg, while the Margrave House and buildings around the Octagon were also enlarged as court life demanded more space.
Under Frederik V the palace and its surroundings entered another important phase. His second wife, Queen Juliane Marie, became closely associated with Fredensborg and spent long periods there. After Frederik V died in 1766, she retained the palace as one of her principal residences. The older description of her simply as “regent” during the reign of the mentally unstable Christian VII is too neat, but the substance behind it remains: following the fall of Struensee in 1772, Juliane Marie and Ove Høegh-Guldberg became central figures in the political regime operating around a king who was increasingly incapable of governing independently. Her influence ended when Crown Prince Frederik seized political power in 1784, but Juliane Marie remained connected with Fredensborg until her death there in 1796. Her death marked the beginning of a quieter period. For much of the early nineteenth century Fredensborg was used relatively little by the Royal Family. Its revival began after Christian IX came to the throne in 1863, and this period gave the palace some of its most colourful history.
Christian IX became known as the “father-in-law of Europe”, and in his case the nickname required very little exaggeration. His daughter Alexandra married the future Edward VII of Britain, while his daughter Dagmar married the future Russian emperor Alexander III and became Empress Maria Feodorovna. Other children married into royal families across Europe. During the celebrated Fredensborg Days, Christian IX and Queen Louise gathered this sprawling international family in Denmark, turning the palace into something approaching an annual reunion of European monarchy.
The diamond signatures on the palace windows grew naturally from that world. What began in the nineteenth century as a personal royal tradition gradually became one of Fredensborg’s most distinctive records of its guests. Kings, queens and later presidents literally left their names in the building.
Some members of the Royal Family did more than visit. After the death of Frederik IX in 1972, the Chancellery House became the home of his widow, Queen Ingrid, and remained so until her death in 2000. It was renovated before the 2004 wedding of Crown Prince Frederik and Mary Donaldson and became their family’s principal residence until 2010, when the renovated Frederik VIII’s Palace at Amalienborg was ready. By the time I visited in 2021, the Crown Prince’s family continued to use Kancellihuset for longer stays at Fredensborg.
The town outside the gates grew with the palace. A functioning royal household needed servants, craftsmen, merchants, suppliers and an expanding network of services, so a settlement developed around the residence and eventually took its name. The quiet shopping street I had walked along from the station therefore existed, indirectly, because three centuries earlier a king had decided he needed somewhere in the countryside to escape his work.
The gardens developed through the same accumulation of royal taste. Krieger’s early plan placed the palace within a Baroque landscape of seven avenues spreading into the surrounding forest. Frederik V later wanted something more ambitious, and in the 1760s Nicolas-Henri Jardin reshaped the grounds with the great formal gardens of France — and particularly the world of Louis XIV and Versailles — as an obvious reference. The result combined monumental axes, sculpture and controlled vistas with the wider hunting landscape.
Taste shifted again in the nineteenth century. Formal Baroque geometry no longer seemed quite so fashionable, and much of the garden was softened into an English-romantic landscape. Many of the old avenues disappeared beneath a network of less rigid, winding paths, although the great central Brede Allé survived as the defining axis.
In 2009 the pendulum moved back towards the Baroque. A major restoration began, ageing avenue trees were replaced, sculptures were restored or recarved, and important historical spaces were reconstructed. Brede Allé reopened in 2013. The aim was not to freeze the garden at one arbitrary date, but to recover the structure that made Fredensborg one of Denmark’s major Baroque landscapes.
Nordmandsdalen belongs to that eighteenth-century world but remains wonderfully peculiar. Its seventy sandstone figures — sixty Norwegian and ten Faroese — depict farmers, fishermen and other ordinary people rather than gods, generals or monarchs. In a palace landscape created for an absolute king, an entire stone population of his subjects was given permanent residence.
The private garden told a different story. Created under Frederik V and reshaped repeatedly afterwards, it gradually became less about displaying royal power and more about royal domestic life. Queen Ingrid played a particularly important role in its modern appearance. The kitchen garden supplied produce for the royal table, the flower garden supplied arrangements for the palace, and in 1995 a new orangery was added so that delicate plants could survive winter under carefully controlled conditions.
That mixture is perhaps the best way to understand Fredensborg. Over three centuries it accumulated peace treaties, dynastic politics, architectural fashion, international marriages, presidents, state visits and seventy sandstone farmers. Yet the thing that struck me most strongly in 2021 was much simpler.
Behind all of it, someone still needed flowers for the rooms, vegetables for dinner and a place to eat breakfast.
