Birgitte Dinesen

Early life
Birgitte Ida Dinesen was born on January 12, 1958 at Aalborg County Hospital, where she lived at Gl. Wiffertsholm. In 1960, the family moved to Kragerup Estate, where Birgitte grew up and was raised to take over Kragerup Estate after her father, Erik Sophus Dinesen.

The journey home to Kragerup Estate
She graduated from Tølløse boarding school in 1974, an English Baccalaureate from Cranborn Chase, Wiltshire in England in 1976 and a higher trade exam at Slagelse Handelsskole in 1978. Birgitte has also worked as a secretary and sales consultant in the company Lysta in Cape Town, South Africa in 1978-1979. In 1983, Birgitte graduated with a degree in business administration, with permanent employment at Imerco, where she worked for a year, followed by a study period in Australia. In 1979, she took over half of Kragerup Estate, where she worked with her father for 12 years until he retired in 1998. At that time, the estate consisted entirely of a large farm. Today, the estate still consists of agriculture, but Birgitte and her partner Olav Ditlevsen have created new life on the estate.

The estate today
Kragerup Estate is today both a conference venue and offers many different party rooms. In the forest there is Denmark’s first climbing park, Go High, which opened in 2009. Denmark’s first trampoline park in the trees, Go Bounce, opened in 2019. There is also a MTB single-track, canoeing in the moat, archery attack, mega table football and much, much more. In the main building is Restaurant Blixen, which opened in 2015. Today, Kragerup Estate is CO2-neutral with its six large wind turbines, its own straw boiler and its own underground water.

The first rooms
In 1998, Birgitte opened the first 6 hotel rooms. At that time, Birgitte and her daughter Regitze still lived in the main building in the rooms. So when all 6 rooms were booked, Regitze had to pack her suitcase so the guests could move in. In the kitchen, Birgitte cooked breakfast for the guests and was responsible for washing dishes, cleaning the rooms and all the other practicalities. Today, the hotel consists of 57 rooms in the main building and in the nearby farm buildings.

The dream of a stud farm
Birgitte has also had Denmark’s largest ostrich production. The idea of the ostrich farm was a good one. The only problem was that back in the 1990s, Danes weren’t ready to eat ostrich. Regitze clearly remembers how she looked after and cared for all the little baby ostriches when she came home from school. She also remembers how her classmates sat with liver pate sandwiches and salami, while she sat with strips of ostrich, dried ostrich, ostrich dumplings, and whatever else you could think of.

The next generation
Birgitte’s daughter Regitze Sophie Dinesen (b. 1990) took over the title of estate owner from her mother in 2021.