Studio
Twenty years ago, a studio opened in Berlin with a single belief: that interiors shape the people who inhabit them. Here is what we learned.
It began with good interior design.
That was the entire ambition in 2006: to shape each space into its right form. But good interior design raises questions that do not fit within four walls. Answering them led the studio into new disciplines — architecture, workplaces, showrooms, hospitality, retail, brand experiences — and somewhere along the way, the work stopped being about interiors alone and became about concepts: ideas about how a space should think, not merely how it should look.
Followed far enough, a concept arrives at something harder to name. Today it would be put this way: we do not design spaces — we design identities. Atmospheres recognised before they can be explained. Through this journey, our understanding of space has kept evolving across twenty years of practice.
The studio opened in 2006 — the same year, as it happens, that Berlin was named a UNESCO City of Design. The city was different then: cheaper, louder, less certain of itself, more interesting in almost every way.
This is how BERLINRODEO Interior Concepts GmbH came to be. In retrospect, the name already carried the idea that would shape everything to come: twenty years of practice, forged from an identity of our own.
What remains clear is the question that defined those early years and never stopped defining the work: what does this city feel like — and how does that translate into a space without becoming a cliché? The answer is still being worked on.
Berlin changed. So did we.
The most visible change has a name and an address: the BERLINRODEO[LAB] based in Charlottenburg, the studio's little sister — the place where bold concepts become something you can actually experience as an immersive project.
What did not change is harder to see, and matters more: the conviction that the material facts of a space — the weight of a door handle, the way light falls across a wall at four in the afternoon — accumulate. Over time, they become 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 unremarkable, but disappearing into the life it supports.
We believe that a studio does not stay alive for twenty years out of nostalgia. It stays alive through love for the work and for the people around it — the clients, collaborators and friends who entrusted us with their spaces. This year, that conviction was given a new face: a new logo and a new website, worn for the first time by our team in the streets of the city that shaped us.
And we believe that Berlin remains one of the most interesting cities in the world to work in. Not because it is easy. Because it is not.
This anniversary has a date and a place. During DesignDays.Berlin (24–26 September), we mark two decades — with an evening in our Studio on September 24, among the people who made these twenty years what they were.
Still here. Still curious.