Maja´s grandmother worked at the hotel ...
When Maja visited as a four-year-old, she had cake and soda in the garden and decided on Hotel Union Øye as her future wedding location. The menu would be salmon and ice cream. The future groom was the only thing missing from her detailed plan for the day. Ever since, Maja’s story has been inextricably linked to the history of the hotel. The way she tells it, intermingling the personal with the historical, brings both to life.
The place was discovered by climbers and anglers from Europe, especially the English and Germans, notable guests including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Kaiser Wilhelm. They came for nature and what it had to offer, but also expected a certain level of comfort. The Kaiser brought his own bathtub on the steamer that took him to Øye, and it is still in use.
And there are more props to enrich the storytelling. Maja lets Karen Blixen’s Burberry riding boots pass through the hands of her attentive audience. She points out a mysterious boulder outside a suite on the second floor. During the second world war, there was a battle in the air space just above the hotel. A bomb struck the mountain, triggering an avalanche of rocks. The boulder has lodged at Hotel Union Øye ever since. She passes around an old ledger, a pair of golden goblets, a walking stick with a burnt tip and a few other items, each with its own part to play in the story.
And while not a prop exactly, many will swear to the existence of Linda, the friendly ghost. She worked as a maid in the times of Kaiser Wilhelm’s visits and fell madly and inappropriately in love with Philip of the Kaiser’s party. Their love was mutual, but turned tragic when Philip was unable to extricate himself from an arranged marriage back in Germany. Both perished in the cold sea, but Linda is said to be still waiting for her beloved Philip, in the blue room of the second floor. Some guests request to stay there for that reason, some request a different room for the same.
In its first heyday, the hotel was visited by the likes of Coco Chanel, Edvard Grieg, William Cecil Slingsby and Henrik Ibsen, but it fell into disrepair as the times changed while the hotel did not. The first step on its path back to former glory was a reopening for a royal visit by newly crowned King Harald and Queen Sonja in 1994. Nevertheless, the Flakk-family taking over in 2009, with their experience has premium hoteliers and passion for creating unique experiences for guests that invigorate local communities, was a game changer. The Flakk-family has restored the hotel to celebrate all the richness of its history, in a way that is timeless, but allows for all modern comforts. They were able to invest in a thorough remodelling, also expanding the hotel with a cluster of traditional west coast farm buildings.
It was perhaps an unexpected consequence of the work put into the hotel, and still very much in line with the Flakk-family’s aim of contributing to the vitality of the local community, that the population of Øye was also expanded. At least three of the craftsmen found love locally and decided to stay. Rumour has it that there is now a groom in place to complete four-year-old Maja’s vision, but that is a story that still remains to be lived and told.
Opened for the first time in 1889 Hotel Union Øye has seen peace and war, endured times of abundance as well as austerity, it has been fashionable and almost forgotten, it has seen great love stories and despair, and it has remained almost stubbornly beautiful over such a long time, in such an unlikely location.
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