Damsgård Manor: A Rococo Wooden Manor in Norway
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.1
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Norway
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Norwegian
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Elite Residence
On this page13 sections
History
Damsgård Manor is a historic wooden manor in Norway, located in Laksevåg, Bergen. Its present form is chiefly an eighteenth-century Rococo creation, and the estate is regarded as one of Norway’s principal examples of Rococo architecture and one of Europe’s best-preserved eighteenth-century wooden manor houses. The property was also known historically as Håsteinar, a name derived from the Old Norse Hásteinar, meaning high stone.
From Håsteinar to Damsgård
The area was probably inhabited during the Viking Age or earlier. Its first written record dates from 1427, when the property belonged to Munkeliv Abbey, a medieval monastery in Bergen. After the Reformation of 1536, King Christian III confiscated the estate with other church properties. In 1562, King Frederick II sold it to Tønnes Claussøn on the condition that he build a merchant’s house.
The estate later passed among private owners from Bergen and from the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and France. A merchant’s residence is not documented before the seventeenth century, although a 1653 map by J. van Geelkerck shows a merchant’s house at the property now associated with Damsgårdveien 174. The name Damsgård first appears in a Bergen financial register in 1643 and is traditionally connected with Dam Tønnessøn, who inherited the estate from his father, Tønnes Claussøn. During the seventeenth century, Håsteinar and Damsgård were used as equivalent names.
The older name may have referred either to Damsgårdfjellet, which rises to 284 metres, or to large stones in Damsgård Bay. The estate served both as a recreational property and as an ordinary residence. A 1731 assessment described a tiled-roof house with a principal room, a daily room, chambers, a kitchen with a chimney, a pantry, and an earthen cellar. Two tiles from a heating stove found during restoration bear the dates 1673 and 1699.
The eighteenth-century manor
The oldest parts of the present manor probably date from the period when Severin Seehusen owned the estate, around 1720. At that time the building functioned both as a country retreat and as a regular home. Contemporary descriptions say that it was painted vivid red and green.
Joachim Christian Geelmuyden Gyldenkrantz acquired Damsgård in 1769. He was a general war commissioner, a senior official responsible for military supply and administration, and was later knighted. He ordered a major reconstruction in 1770. By the end of the decade, the property had acquired its U-shaped plan, a tower on the main building, and its Rococo facade. Gyldenkrantz died at Damsgård on Christmas Day 1795.
In 1796, the estate was sold at auction to Herman Didrich Janson, then one of Bergen’s wealthiest merchants. Janson made modest changes to the exterior but substantially altered the interiors. The Janson family retained ownership until 1983, and the house had been occupied throughout the year from about 1870. A major interior renovation in 1865 saw many rooms painted and covered with wallpaper, changes that later became part of the building’s layered history.
Protection and restoration
Damsgård Manor received legal protection as a historic monument on 27 February 1924. In 1983, ownership passed to the state and to the Vestlandske kunstindustrimuseum in Bergen, beginning a ten-year restoration. The museum opened in 1993, and its administration passed to Bymuseet i Bergen, Bergen’s municipal museum organization, in 2005.
The restoration was undertaken under Norway’s environmental protection authority in cooperation with the Directorate for Cultural Heritage, the national authority responsible for protecting and conserving historic buildings and archaeological sites. The building was assessed, secured, and adapted for museum use. Serious problems were found in its structural framework and foundations, so the first five years concentrated on repairing the roof and walls and stabilizing the structure.
Conservation favored the preservation of original fabric rather than wholesale replacement. Later wallpaper and gilding were removed where appropriate, and the rooms were arranged to represent different periods in the manor’s history. The estate remains part of the city museums of Bergen. In April 2013, a car crossed the main gate and struck the rear facade of the principal building.
Remains
Damsgård Manor survives as a wooden Rococo estate arranged around a principal building with a U-shaped plan. The main facade faces the maritime approach to Bergen and was designed to appear larger than the building itself. Painted windows on the side facing the formal garden help create the intended symmetry, even though some of them are not open windows. The building and its rooms retain evidence of successive alterations, from the eighteenth-century reconstruction to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century interiors preserved through restoration.
The principal building
Facade and entrance halls
The main entrance is framed by two columns set on curved pedestal bases, or postaments. Each column supports part of a pediment, creating an unusual seated-column motif in which the supports appear inconsistent with the normal load-bearing function of a column. Similar forms occur in several western Norwegian altarpieces, probably made in Bergen, but the motif is not known to have been used elsewhere outside western Norway. A drawing of the facade by Valentin Wedel closely resembles the upper portion of an altarpiece at Sykkylven, raising the possibility that the same artist worked on both. The triangular pediment visible today was altered around 1800.
Art historian Jan Hendrich Lexow connected the curved columns with Andrea Pozzo’s treatise on perspective and architecture, published in Rome between 1693 and 1700. The work included thirteen fanciful altar designs known as altare capriccioso. The front hall, directly inside the entrance, received guests and has decorative panels above the doorways, called supraportes, showing Munkholmen near Trondheim, Fredriksberg in Copenhagen, and North Sea whaling. Marble slabs from Bergen pave the floor.
Reception and family rooms
The rear hall faces the courtyard. Its eighteenth-century courtyard door originally stood in the main facade and was moved during Gyldenkrantz’s alterations around 1770. Traces of the first staircase remain visible, together with a fire bucket dating from the period of the first Janson.
The Blue Room lies to the right of the entrance hall and forms a passage between the entrance and the Red Cabinet. It overlooks Laksevåg Church and Kirkebukt. Its name comes from blue-and-white velour wallpaper installed during Gyldenkrantz’s renovation. The room contains portraits and engravings, including a 1783 portrait of Gyldenkrantz by J. C. C. Michaelsen, as well as a chandelier, a rare dark-tiled German stove from the mid-eighteenth century, and silver objects displayed in a cabinet. The floor is later than the room’s principal decorative scheme.
Adjoining the Blue Room, the Red Cabinet has the same outlook. Its name refers to wallpaper installed around 1865, while its furniture dates mainly from the middle of the nineteenth century. On the west side of the main house, the Mistress’s Chamber connects with the Red Cabinet and gives access to the small kitchen. It overlooks the Mistress’s Garden and contains a large late-eighteenth-century four-poster bed.
The small kitchen overlooks the courtyard and was used when no festivities were taking place. Its arrangement is preserved as the Janson family left it in 1983. Opposite the Blue Room on the main facade, the Golden Room is richly furnished, although much of its furniture dates from the first half of the nineteenth century. Its gold-colored wall treatment belongs to the period when Herman Didrich Janson acquired the house.
The Medallion Room adjoins the Golden Room and occupies a corner on the main and east facades. Its light red decoration includes five painted medallions in decorated frames and panels. The subjects include landscapes and Janson’s boats. Furniture and a chandelier from the second half of the nineteenth century remain in the room, and a garden door was added on the east side in 1887.
Service rooms and upper floor
The Master’s Chamber lies on the west side of the principal building and can be reached from the Medallion Room and the kitchen. It overlooks the Master’s Garden and has a ceiling frieze decorated with running dogs. Its furniture dates from the beginning of the twentieth century.
The kitchen occupies the rear of the principal building. It connects with the rear hall, Golden Room, Master’s Chamber, and a small passage leading to the Porcelain Room. Large windows face the courtyard, while a substantial cooking fireplace dominates the room. The late-Baroque color scheme was reconstructed during the latest restoration, with purple walls, light-blue window sills, light-green doors and mouldings, and ochre and reddish-brown panels.
The Porcelain Room is in the east wing behind the Master’s Chamber. Janson furnished it in 1796, and restoration recovered its original gray and green wall colors. Much of its earlier inventory was later sold or inherited, but a breakfast service purchased from the Royal Porcelain Factory in Copenhagen in 1798 remains on display. It includes several glass pieces, among them a punch bowl that originally belonged to Danckert Danckertsen Krohn.
The ballroom occupies the second floor of the main building. Rococo-style doors and a chandelier accompany dark draperies, portraits, mirrors, and eighteenth-century furniture. The chairs retain their gilded leather upholstery.
The gardens
Master’s Garden
The grounds contain the eastern Master’s Garden, the western Mistress’s Garden, and the English Garden. The Master’s and Mistress’s gardens are enclosed by walls designed to reduce wind and retain warmth. The Master’s Garden has a strict geometric layout with six planting squares and an avenue of yew trees. Its paths are covered with white gravel.
Mistress’s Garden
The Mistress’s Garden follows a less formal design and contains both a duck pond and a carp pond. The duck pond lies on an axis with the window of the Mistress’s bedroom. This transverse line continues through the house toward the Master’s Garden, where a copy of a Neptune statue sends water into a small basin. A copy of Mercury stood in the western garden. Neptune represented seafaring and Mercury trade, two activities important to Bergen’s livelihood.
English Garden
The English Garden lies outside the enclosing walls and is separated from the house by a road. It was probably first arranged as a semicircle planted with lime trees during the mid-eighteenth century. Around 1830, it was redesigned as an English landscape garden, with a bridge over a stream, a pond with climbing plants, and paths. A small stream and path remain among its features.
A late twentieth-century conservation project restored the Master’s and Mistress’s gardens to an eighteenth-century appearance. The work was led by Bergen’s municipal recreation department according to plans by Swedish landscape architect Sven-Ingvar Andersson. Botanists from the University of Bergen selected historically plausible ornamental and useful plants, including roses, cabbage, onions, thyme, mint, and sage. Copies of contemporary garden sculptures were also installed, and the restored garden complex received the Green Park of the Year award in 1999.
