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Facts
Museum
The Brede Works are a part of the National Museum of Denmark
Guided tours
Public guided tours every Sunday at 12 and 13.30.
| Museum featuring the industrial society along the Mølleå stream around 1900
A cradle of industry
The unique industrial works of Brede (Brede Værk) gives the visitor a vivid impression of a small community with workers cottages, managerial housing, the factory owner’s country house, an eating house, children’s nursery, gardening etc. Since the Middle Ages, there have been mills along the Mølleå stream processing copper, grain cloth etc. The exhibition “The Cradle of Industry”, housed in the former cloth factory buildings, tells the story of industrialisation along the Mølleå stream and life in the small industrial community around the year 1900.
The Brede Main building – a rare pearl from 1795
The Brede Main building is part of the works that until 1831 made up the Brede Copper and Brass Works and then became the Brede Clothmill. The Brede Main building was built in 1795 as the summer residence of Peter Van Hemerts, owner of the Brede Works. He commissioned the period’s leading architects to design the Mansion, including the Court decorator Joseph Chr. Lillie who where put in charge of the wall decorations, and presumably also most of the furniture. The building is furnished according to the trend of the period, with the simple and delicate Neo-classical furniture, and decorated with elaborate painted details on walls and mirrors.
When the Danish National Museum took over the Brede Works, it needed repair and the Brede Main Building now once again appears as an outstanding example of a complete Louis XVI interior from the 1790s. The building thus offers a rare look into how a well-to-do merchant family lived in the late 1700s.
Clothing and fashion from the 1700s and to the present
The exhibition ”Dress and the Body” shows examples of the Museum’s extensive collection of clothing and fashion from the 1700s to the present. In the 500 square metres exhibition the history of fashion is displayed. Clothing from different environments in Denmark is exhibited; from the countryside and the city, from the nobility and bourgeoisie, from the workplace to the entertainment business – both the finest and plainest of clothes. The fashion displayed ranges from gowns sewn in the finest French and Danish fashion houses, to homemade clothes and ersatz commodities during the 2. World War.
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