The most beautiful home in Solvang is a curious museum of art and history

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

As many times as I’ve walked up and down Copenhagen Drive and Alisal Road, trying aebleskiver and visiting Sideways spots, I had never walked into the residential area between downtown and Nojoqui Falls Park. There were modest cottages and mid-century ranches along the leafy streets and suddenly the grandest house in town.

Now the building is the Elverhoj Museum of History and Art, once the home of two internationally renowned artists: the Danish-American sculptor Viggo Brand-Eriksen and the painter Marta Mott. The couple moved to Solvang in 1949 and soon after began building a home modeled after an 18th-century Danish farmhouse, according to the museum’s history, and turned nearly every surface into a work of art. Brand-Eriksen hand-carved the stone fireplace and the large wooden entrance door decorated with an elf motif, which he designed to depict the story of Denmark’s first national play, the 1828 Elverhoj, from which the museum takes its name. Mott treats the interior of the home as a canvas for his paintings; the kitchen, a bright, grassy green decorated with wildflowers, may be the most beautiful kitchen in all of California.

Brand-Eriksen died in 1955. After Mott’s death in 1983, she donated the house to become a museum. Elverhoj is now a non-profit organization, free and open to the public five days a week, although donations are welcome.

In addition to the art created by the couple, the space is dedicated to Solvang’s history and 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 windmill and bakery paradise it is now, with all the tourism the European enclave attracts, until 1940, thanks in large part to a 1947 Saturday Evening Post article praising the place. Former bedrooms in the house detail this history and the town’s transformation from a Wild West outpost to a place that looks like an idyllic set from The Good Place. Danish artifacts from the 1800s give glimpses of what immigrants would have brought with them to California, and in the back of the carriage house is a huge diorama depicting Solvang in the 1920s, not a windmill in sight mill.

The rest of the space is dedicated to rotating exhibits. The one that runs until January 15, 2024 is The Magical World of Eyvind Earl. Before I visited, I had never heard the name – but as soon as I walked in, I knew why I should. Earle was an animator for Walt Disney Studios who began as a background artist in the early 1950s and eventually became such an integral part of the company’s feature animation that he was responsible for shaping the iconic mid-century Art Deco hybrid aesthetic of Sleeping Beauty, a 1959 Disney film.

Two of Earle’s paintings in the exhibition show them working. One, called “Sleeping Beauty Country Side,” features the French-inspired countryside where Princess Aurora lived, a small, colorful village in the foreground and the castle looming in the distance. The other, “Until the Princess Wakes,” features Sleeping Beauty herself, with fairy godmothers Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather keeping watch. Earl died in 2000 and was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 2015.

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

“We made a small detour to visit the small Danish community of Solvang, about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles,” he wrote. “There, among dozens and dozens of pastry shops, was a very large, beautiful art gallery. We went 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 exhibition were inspired by the Santa Ynez Valley, such as the 1990 oil painting Solvang, a green space on a mountainside dotted with cattle, and the 1998 serigraph From Hills and Valley, a view from bird’s eye view of mist-filled valley at sunrise, with mountains rising beyond. Even if you didn’t know the artist was part of Disney’s heyday, you’ll still notice that element of magic in the works, where even the simplest things seem like they’re happening in a fairy tale.