Novasol Brand Guidelines: Nordisk Ferie of 1968, Danish Summer Houses & Awaze

A Copenhagen cellar and cabins in Norway.

Novasol began in Copenhagen at the very end of 1968. A Cendant press release of April 2002, which retold the company’s history, says a new firm called Nordisk Ferie was set up on 28 December 1968, that its first product was cabin holidays in Norway, and that it started as a one-man operation in a cellar in Nørrebro, a district of inner Copenhagen. The French trade paper TourMaG told the same story in May 2009: Nordisk Ferie let chalets in Norway to Danish holidaymakers. Danish Wikipedia names the founder as Frederik Anker Heegaard.

The company later took the name Novasol, but the model stayed the same in outline. It markets privately owned holiday homes for rent on behalf of their owners, rather than owning the houses itself. By 2002 it worked under two brands, Novasol and Dansommer, principally across Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany and Eastern Europe, according to the Cendant release, which put its portfolio at more than 17,000 cottages in Northern Europe. The same release described Novasol as a Danish-owned business going international, with subsidiaries in several countries and offices at popular holiday resorts.

The Danish summer house sits at the centre of the offer. Danish Wikipedia describes Novasol today as a Danish summer-house rental agency handling more than 10,000 holiday homes in Denmark, with 27 local offices in the country and a head office in Virum, north of Copenhagen, and says its Danish homes are let under the Novasol, Dansommer and Awaze names. A Novasol announcement of September 2016 also gave Virum as the group’s central office.

The name itself is written two ways. Both the 2002 Cendant release and the 2016 announcement set it in capitals, as NOVASOL, and Awaze’s brand page does the same in 2026, while news reports and Danish Wikipedia write Novasol. This guide uses the mixed-case form in running text.

Cendant, Wyndham and a wider map.

The first change of owner came in 2002. On 18 April 2002 the American travel and property group Cendant announced a definitive agreement to buy Novasol AS. The release called it Cendant’s third purchase in vacation rentals, after the British Holiday Cottages Group and the Italian firm Cuendet in 2001, and said that where Cuendet had extended its range of contracted properties to Southern Europe, Novasol would add Northern Europe. Cendant also pointed to the more than 11,000 travel agent partners of Novasol and Dansommer.

By 2009 Novasol was part of the Wyndham Worldwide group, alongside Cuendet, TourMaG reported in May that year. The paper put the portfolio at 25,000 addresses in 21 European countries, 4,000 of them in Croatia, and described a push into France: Novasol had opened an office in Cannes in 2007 and a French website in 2008, and was now using Cuendet’s links with travel agencies to sell its homes to French holidaymakers.

The map widened again in 2016. In an announcement dated 6 September 2016, “NOVASOL by Wyndham Vacation Rentals” said it had bought Friendly Rentals, a Barcelona company letting about 2,000 city apartments in 23 cities, mainly in central and southern Europe, and that the Friendly Rentals brand would carry on as before. The company called city apartments a strategic supplement to a portfolio made up mainly of cottages. It said the brands Novasol, Happy Home, Dansommer, Cuendet and Friendly Rentals together had more than 42,000 holiday homes under contract, that the group had offices in 14 European countries, and that more than 1.5 million holidaymakers stayed in its homes in 2015; those are the company’s own figures.

Design and documentation.

Holiday rental companies fall into two broad groups: marketplaces, which list homes run by others, and managers, which run the homes themselves. Vacasa, which English Wikipedia describes as a vacation rental management company, and Sonder, which leased and operated its own apartments, belong to the second group. A manager answers to owners or landlords as well as to guests, and Vacasa built a separate app for the owners whose homes it looked after, according to the same source.

Search and listing pages carry much of this work. In 2019 Vacasa began showing its rental homes directly in Google search results, English Wikipedia says, and in July 2026, ShortTermRentalz reported, TravelAI relaunched Sonder.com as a booking site whose listings would be selected for design, location and quality. In a 2020 profile, Surface magazine illustrated Sonder with photographs of its interiors in Philadelphia, Savannah and Montreal, and quoted its founder on celebrating “architecture and the arts.”

Naming follows ownership. When Marriott International signed its licensing agreement with Sonder in August 2024, the portfolio was to join its system as a collection called “Sonder by Marriott Bonvoy.” In 2026 the operator Prism opened former Sonder buildings in the United States under its Belvilla brand, as Belvilla District 6, and Casago’s franchisees trade under place names such as Casago San Diego and Casago Belize, ShortTermRentalz reported.

Apps sit at the centre of the guest’s stay. Surface described Sonder guests receiving an access code and concierge services through an app in place of a front desk. This guide sets out each company’s founding, owners, listings and sales as dated facts, and marks clearly what rests only on a company’s own word.

A Danish brand inside Awaze.

In May 2018 Wyndham Worldwide announced that it had completed the sale of its European vacation rentals business to an affiliate of the private equity firm Platinum Equity. The announcement listed Novasol among more than two dozen local brands in that business, with cottages.com, James Villa Holidays, Landal GreenParks and Hoseasons, and said the business would keep using a “by Wyndham Vacation Rentals” endorser name under a 20-year agreement. In March 2019, Skift reported, the group took a new corporate name, Awaze, while brands such as Novasol, Cottages.com, James Villa Holidays and Landal GreenParks were to keep working independently.

The group then narrowed. Awaze said on 18 April 2023 that it had completed the sale of Landal GreenParks to Roompot, and that its managed vacation rentals business, including the cottages.com, Hoseasons, James Villa Holidays and Novasol brands, was not part of that sale and remained in Platinum Equity’s portfolio. Danish Wikipedia gives the Danish company’s formal name today as Awaze A/S. On Awaze’s brand page in November 2026, Novasol is presented with more than 50,000 villas, cottages and apartments in 19 European countries, figures given by the company.

For a design guide, Novasol shows how a brand born from one simple product, cabin holidays in Norway for Danish holidaymakers, can carry the same name through several owners and a much larger map. Compare Interhome, a Swiss holiday-home specialist founded three years earlier, and Awaze, the group it now belongs to. For this guide we use a deep fjord blue, a pale dune sand and a warm cabin red with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Novasol’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.