Studio
Twenty years ago, a studio opened in Charlottenburg with a single belief: that interiors shape the people who inhabit them. Here is what we learned.
We did not set out to build a studio that would last twenty years. We set out to make one good room. Then another. Then another after that.
Twenty years later, we are still making rooms. But the question of what makes a room good has become considerably more interesting.
The studio opened in Charlottenburg in 2006. The city was different then — cheaper, louder, less certain of itself, more interesting in almost every way. We worked from a single rented space on Kantstraße. Our first commissions were small: a kitchen in Prenzlauer Berg, an office fit-out in Mitte, a living room for a couple who had just moved from Munich and wanted their apartment to feel like Berlin.
That last brief — feel like Berlin — became something of a guiding question for us. What does a city feel like? How do you put that into a room without it becoming a cliché? We are still working on the answer.
The scale of the work changed. The complexity changed. The team grew from two people to twelve. We moved studios three times.
What did not change was the conviction that the material things in a space — the weight of a door handle, the way light falls across a wall at four in the afternoon, the sound a floor makes under a certain kind of shoe — these things matter. They accumulate. They become, over time, the texture of a life.
We believe that restraint is harder than excess, and more rewarding. We believe that a good interior should be invisible — not in the sense of being unremarkable, but in the sense of disappearing into the life it supports.
We believe that Berlin is still one of the most interesting cities in the world to work in. Not because it is easy, but because it is not.
Twenty years. We are just getting started.