About the building

	Top: Silkeborg Tourist Office as seen today. Bottom: The building as seen back in time.

Silkeborg Tourist Office
Silkeborg Tourist Office is situated very idyllic by the harbour in Silkeborg, in a big villa built in 1921. Bank manager Arnold Knap had the house erected for his private home after the local architect Anton Rosen's drawings.

The family lived elegantly with big living rooms nicely furnished with aristocratic dark furniture of the time and with two rooms for the maids. No doubt, the villa witnessed much serious talk and big cigars.

The crying of a child
In 1956, the house altered status radically as it changed from being a private home to being a maternity home. Miss V.Rasmussen bought the villa and set up Midtjysk Fødeklinik (The maternity home in the heart of Jutland), which in the years between 1956 and 1979, helped several children in Silkeborg into the world. The aristocratic living rooms now sounded from babies and old wives’ tales and a pane of glass in the door was even decorated with a stork.

Rock music
The maternity home closed in 1979 and for a few years, it was unclear what would happen to the house. Miss Rasmussen’s successors could not immediately sell the house – it was probably too big for a common private home, but in 1982 six persons bought it and turned it into a houseshare.
It was a houseshare until 1994, and according to one of the residents it was a perfect place to live with many parties in the big living rooms. The crying of children was replaced with rock music.

Foreign languages
After the municipality in Silkeborg bought the house in 1994, it was renovated and on the 10th of May 1996 the doors were opened to the public in the new Silkeborg Tourist Office. Here, many tourists and people from Silkeborg daily receive answers to their questions in Danish as well as in foreign languages. The yellow walls hold numerous brochures and plenty of information, and today, the big room designed for the bank manager’s living room functions as the office where customers are served.
When Anton Rosen designed the house in 1921, he hardly had a tourist office in mind, but nonetheless the house today functions as such although there has been no major changes to the bank manager’s villa.

Rosen
Anton Rosen is also the architect behind several other characteristic buildings in Silkeborg, for example Th. Langs Skole (school) and Ørneapoteket (pharmacy). His architecture is very distinctive and looks like nothing else in Denmark from that time, as he was inspired by more movements e.g. art nouveau from the turn of the century.