Qualla: Liselund

Liselund: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niels Elgaard Larsen, CC BY-SA 3.0. In a guest room of the Norwegian House at Liselund, the window shutters carry a small opening of yellow glass. Close them on the brightest July afternoon and the room fills with something that looks convincingly like moonlight. That single detail explains the whole place: six hectares in the north-eastern corner of the Danish island of Møn, engineered at considerable expense to produce particular feelings on demand. Antoine Bosc de la Calmette laid it out in the 1790s for his wife, Anna Catharina Elisabeth Iselin, whom everyone called Lise. Liselund means Lise's grove.

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Image: Niels Elgaard Larsen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Liselund: A Huguenot Washes Up on Møn

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elgaard, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Calmettes were Huguenots, driven out of France to Holland generations earlier. Antoine's father worked as a diplomat, serving terms in Switzerland and Portugal before landing in Denmark, where the family was naturalised and recognised as Danish nobility in 1776. In January 17...

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Image: Elgaard | CC BY-SA 3.0

Liselund: Building a Mood

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Einsamer Schütze, CC BY-SA 4.0. The ground had to be drained, cleared and levelled before anything could be planted on it. Then it was landscaped to the standards of the day and stocked with trees, some of them rare in Denmark: oak, sweet chestnut, walnut, mulberry, spruce, cypress. Water is the essential ingre...

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Image: Einsamer Schütze | CC BY-SA 4.0

Liselund: The Scatter of Foreign Houses

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Erik Christensen, CC BY 3.0. Scattered through the park are buildings that belong somewhere else entirely, each one placed to suit its setting and to shift the visitor's mood on arrival. The Swiss House, Schweizerhytten, stands at the foot of a Bronze Age burial mound near the entrance drive; it housed the g...

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Image: Erik Christensen | CC BY 3.0

Liselund: Andersen at Twenty-Four

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ipigott, Public domain. Antoine and Lise had barely a decade in the finished park; he died in 1803, she in 1805. The long chapter belonged to their daughter-in-law Martha de la Calmette, who lived here as a widow for fifty-seven years until her death in 1877 and made the place a fixture of the Danish Go...

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Image: Ipigott | Public domain

Liselund: Down the Cliff Path in the Dark

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Allie_Caulfield from Germany, CC BY 2.0. In 1887 Baron Fritz Rosenkrantz built a larger, Italianate house on the western slope, Liselund Ny Slot, which is a hotel today and was sold in June 2025 to Frederik Nørgaard, a Dane returning after thirty years in San Francisco. But the estate's hardest years came under Baron Ni...

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Image: Allie_Caulfield from Germany | CC BY 2.0