Sarah Kingdom visits the Savoy 1918 and discovers a heritage hotel in the heart of Oslo that has been given a new lease of life
Oslo has never been short of hotels, but Savoy 1918 has something most of the newer arrivals don’t: a past. The hotel first opened in 1918 and has occupied the corner of Universitetsgata and Pilestredet for more than a hundred years. After a substantial renovation, it reopened in July 2026 with 92 rooms, Café WATT, Savoy Bar and a small wellness area. While the name has stayed the same, everything else has had a rethink.
A Hotel With History
The building is part of Oslo’s architectural history, but inside, the renovation doesn’t attempt to recreate 1918. There are references to the hotel’s earlier life, including vintage furniture and details that acknowledge the age of the building, but the rooms are unmistakably contemporary, and that seems the sensible approach. A hotel isn’t a museum, and Savoy 1918 works better for not pretending to be one.
Individually designed rooms are central to the new Savoy 1918 concept; there are no rows of identical of bedrooms here. Room sizes, layouts and details all vary according to their shape and size, and where they are located in the old building. The smallest rooms start at around 9 square metres, while the larger suites have considerably more room to spread out. The WATT Suite, at 90 square metres, occupies the top of the building, and has separate bedroom, living and dining areas.
The new design is restrained rather than showy. There are beautifully upholstered chairs, proper writing desks, a sprinkling of vintage pieces and beautiful soft fabrics, unlike the usual Scandinavian design clichés.
I particularly liked that the rooms have individual personalities, and don’t all look as though they’ve been ‘photocopied’ from a furniture catalogue. The windows and proportions of the original building do much of the work, but what is special is that the irregularities of the old building have been retained rather than ironed out.
In The Centre Of Oslo
And then there’s the location. The Savoy 1918 is in central Oslo, close enough to the National Theatre and Karl Johans gate to make walking the obvious way of getting around. The hotel is in the Tullinløkka area, where galleries, museums, cafés and restaurants are all within easy reach. This is a hotel for exploring Oslo rather than escaping from it.
Café WATT
The ground-floor Café WATT is the social centre of the hotel and attracts Oslo residents as much as hotel guests. The restaurant runs from breakfast through to dinner, so you can have your first coffee of the day here and return later for a glass of wine.
Dinner at Café WATT is special, and a good reason to stay in. Chef Nils Flatmark, a former Nordic Chef of the Year and gold medallist at the Culinary Olympics, takes a straightforward approach to Norwegian produce, summed up by his philosophy of ekte, enkelt & naturlig – authentic, simple and natural. The menu moves between familiar European cooking and Norwegian ingredients, with dishes such as pan-fried scallop with apple and elderflower, Sirdal trout with warm sour-cream sauce, cucumber and dill potatoes, and grilled halibut with mussel sauce and pearl potatoes.
Flatmark’s cooking is confident without being showy, and Café WATT feels more like a neighbourhood restaurant than a hotel dining room, For guests, that means there is no need to head out into Oslo looking for dinner; the restaurant downstairs is doing something interesting of its own.
The History
The name isn’t decorative. Savoy 1918 has had several reincarnations since it first opened. The building began life as the Watt Building, with construction starting in 1916, before the Savoy opened two years later. There were periods when it became a meeting place for artists and writers, followed by the more nightlife-oriented years of the late twentieth century. The current renovation is therefore another chapter, rather than a total reinvention.
You can see some of the history in the building, though you won’t find it presented as a sequence of exhibits. There’s a temptation when renovating an old European hotel to cover every available surface with sepia photographs and stories about famous former guests, Savoy 1918 largely avoids that. Instead, the history is in the bones of the building.
A Quieter Side Of Oslo
The wellness facilities are modest, comprising fitness and relaxation facilities rather than a full-scale destination spa. That’s enough. Oslo is a city where you are likely to spend more time outside the hotel than in it, and Savoy’s wellness offering is more useful for unwinding after a day out than for becoming the reason for your stay.
What is wonderful is the sauna, offering a rather Nordic way to unwind. The sauna is perfect for warming up, followed by a dip in the cold plunge pool, for the less faint-hearted. It’s a simple setup, but an appealing one after a day walking around Oslo. I visited every night of my stay, and came home trying to figure out where I could fit my own sauna back at home.
A Hotel With Personality
There is also something decidedly pleasing about the scale of the hotel. Ninety-two rooms is large enough to provide the facilities you’d expect from a top city hotel, but small enough for the building to retain some personality. And personality is really what Savoy 1918 is selling.
It’s not nostalgia. The hotel doesn’t work by asking you to imagine what Oslo was like in 1918. Instead, it takes a building with a long memory and gives it another purpose, and that’s makes it a particularly good fit for a city such as Oslo, which has changed enormously in recent decades. The new museums, restaurants and waterfront developments have transformed the city, but Savoy provides a link with an older Oslo, without requiring you to stay somewhere old-fashioned.
For visitors coming to Oslo for a few days, the practical advantages are obvious: a central location, a restaurant and bar downstairs, individually designed rooms and enough history to make the building interesting in its own right.
Tell me more about Savoy 1918
Savoy 1918 Universitetsgata 11, 0164 Oslo, Norway
E: post@savoy1918.no Tel: +47 22221918
Rates: Prices start from £299/$407 for a classic petite room (this is a single-occupancy room) and £316/$430 for a classic room (sleeps two), though prices vary based on date and room type.
The hotel is pet friendly, with a pet surcharge of £27/$37 per room, per night.
For bookings online there is currently a promotion. Stay 2 nights, get 15% off. Stay 3 nights, get 20% off. Stay 4 or more nights, get 25% off.
