We went inside the most beautiful home in Solvang

In a city as full of curiosities as Solvang, the tiny Danish village on California’s Central Coast, I shouldn’t have been surprised that there was a place like the Elverhoj Museum of History & Art. Housed in a historic home, it’s both a tribute to Danish history in Europe and California and a host for traveling exhibitions (including the current, stealthily Disney one — but more on that later). 

As many times as I’ve strolled up and down Copenhagen Drive and Alisal Road, sampling aebleskiver and visiting locations from “Sideways,” I had never walked the residential neighborhood between downtown and Nojoqui Falls Park. There were modest cottages and mid-century ranches on the tree-lined streets, and all of a sudden, the most stately house in the city. 

Now the Elverhoj Museum of History & Art, the building was once the home of two internationally renowned artists: Danish American sculptor Viggo Brandt-Erichsen and painter Martha Mott. The couple moved to Solvang in 1949 and shortly after began constructing a home modeled after an 18th century Danish farmhouse, according to museum history, and turning nearly every surface into a work of art. Brandt-Erichsen hand-carved the stone fireplace and the large wooden front door, adorned with an elf motif he designed to depict the story of Denmark’s first national play, the 1828 “Elverhoj,” which is where the museum got its name. Mott treated the home’s interior as a canvas for her paintings; the kitchen, a vivid, grassy green emblazoned with wildflowers, might be the most beautiful kitchen in all of California. 

Brandt-Erichsen died in 1955. Upon Mott’s death in 1983, she donated the house to become a museum. Now, Elverhoj is a nonprofit, and free and open to the public five days a week, though donations are suggested. 

Besides the art created by the couple, the space is dedicated to the history of Solvang and to the Danish American immigrant experience. The village was founded on what was originally Chumash land in 1911 by three Danish settlers. Solvang didn’t become the haven of windmills and bakeries it is now, with all the tourism the European enclave attracts, until the 1940s, owing largely to a 1947 article in the Saturday Evening Post singing the praises of the place. Former bedrooms inside the house detail that history, and the city’s transformation from Wild West outpost to a place that looks like an idyllic set from “The Good Place.” Danish artifacts from the 1800s give a glimpse of what immigrants would have brought with them to California, and out back in the carriage house, there’s a huge diorama depicting 1920s Solvang, with nary a windmill in sight. 

The rest of the space is devoted to rotating exhibits. The one running through Jan. 15, 2024, is “The Magical World of Eyvind Earle.” Before I visited, I had never heard that name before — but as soon as I walked in, I realized why I should have. Earle was an animator for Walt Disney Studios, who started as a background artist in the early 1950s and eventually became so integral to the company’s feature animation that he was responsible for shaping the iconic medieval-Art Deco hybrid aesthetic of “Sleeping Beauty,” the 1959 Disney film.

Two of Earle’s paintings in the exhibit display that work. One, called “Sleeping Beauty Country Side,” depicts the French-inspired countryside where Princess Aurora lived, a small, colorful village in the front and the castle rising up in the distance. The other, “Until the Princess Awakens,” shows Sleeping Beauty herself, with fairy godmothers Flora, Fauna and Merryweather keeping watch. Earle died in 2000, and was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 2015.

Earle, whose work is also part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, lived in Solvang from 1968 to 1978. The exhibit quotes parts of Earle’s autobiography, “Horizon Bound on a Bicycle.”

“We took a small detour to visit the little Danish community of Solvang, about a hundred or so miles north of Los Angeles,” he wrote. “There, in between dozens and dozens of pastry shops, was a very large handsome art gallery. We walked in and I asked the owner if he was interested in exhibiting other artists. He said, ‘Why don’t you bring me a painting, and we’ll see if we can sell it.’ The Copenhagen Gallery in Solvang sold every painting I gave them.”

Many of his other works in the exhibit are inspired by Santa Ynez Valley, like the 1990 oil painting “Solvang,” a green expanse of mountainside dotted with cattle, and the 1998 serigraph “Of the Hills and Valley,” a bird’s-eye view of the mist-filled valley at sunrise, with mountains rising up beyond. Even if you didn’t know the artist was part of the Disney heyday, you’d still pick up on that element of magic in the works, wherein even the simplest things seem like they’re happening in a fairy tale.