That became the recurring theme over the next three days, and the clearest example sits below ground. Vestkantbadet originally opened as a public bath in 1932 and has been restored as the centrepiece of Sommerro’s wellness offering. To reach the pool, you walk through timber changing rooms that feel like they belong to another era before emerging into a tiled bathing hall dominated by Per Krohg’s original mosaic. Even before you get in the water, there is a sense that you have stepped into some kind of time capsule.

After three weeks travelling around Europe with a backpack, getting into that pool felt close to euphoric. A few slow laps stretched out a lower back that had spent far too much time on trains, planes and questionable hotel pillows, before I moved into the sauna, where there were rarely more than two or three other people. For a hotel of Sommerro’s size, that became another surprise. I swam more than once and never shared the pool with more than a handful of people.

It was one of the most relaxing parts of the entire trip, and much of that came from the setting. In Australia, we have become pretty good at spending serious money building brand new bathhouses designed to look as though they might have existed for a century. At Sommerro, you walk through those timber changing rooms and realise you are standing in the thing everyone else is trying to recreate. There is a rooftop pool too, and it is impressive in a completely different way. Sitting in warm water above the Oslo skyline while cold Scandinavian air moves around you is a fairly easy proposition to get behind, but given the choice, I kept gravitating downstairs. The rooftop gives you the view, while Vestkantbadet gives you the feeling of having slipped back through time.

Then there is the gym, which probably deserves more attention than a hotel gym normally would. Most exist somewhere on a spectrum between depressing and adequate. A treadmill facing a wall, one cable machine and a set of dumbbells that mysteriously stops at 10 kilograms. Sommerro’s is different. At around 400 square metres, it feels much closer to a serious commercial training space than a room of equipment included to tick a box, with enough strength and cardio gear, open space and variety that you can actually train properly instead of inventing some compromised hotel workout around whatever happens to be available. It is comfortably the best hotel gym I have used.

That might sound like a strange thing to linger on in a story about a historic Oslo hotel, but it is central to why Sommerro works so well. The restoration does not treat modern comfort as something that needs to be hidden apologetically behind the heritage. The gym is excellent because people actually want to train. The technology in the rooms works because people actually use it. The hotel has been preserved, but not trapped.

The local memberships help too. Sommerro is not a sealed hotel world where every person you see is wearing the same robe and consulting the same itinerary. People come in to exercise, use the baths, meet friends, eat or have a drink. You get the sense that the building has retained some version of its original public function, even if electricity bills have been replaced by glasses of wine and gym memberships. The scale becomes almost stranger the longer you stay. You know there are hundreds of rooms somewhere above you, yet the pool might have four people in it, the sauna three, and the gym enough room to train without circling equipment like a vulture.

Even breakfast, surely the easiest place for a hotel of this size to expose itself, never felt chaotic. It is served in Ekspedisjonshallen beneath Krohg’s enormous original artwork, with an upscale buffet supplemented by table service. The room itself is grand and lively in the morning, but never felt like hundreds of people had simultaneously been funnelled downstairs in search of eggs and caffeine. It was another small reminder that Sommerro somehow manages to absorb a lot of people without constantly reminding you they are there.