Home Berlin
06.30.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Design Gallery in Berlin Gives a Long-Overdue Platform to Up-and-Coming German Studios

Despite being a longtime haven for artists and creatives — with its (formerly) cheap rents and surplus of accessible studio and exhibition spaces — Berlin never really made any sort of cohesive mark on the contemporary furniture-design world. That's why I got so excited recently when I heard about Forma, a new pop-up design gallery on the Spree river showing mostly contemporary work by mostly German or Germany-based designers like Nazara Lazaro, Carsten in der Elst, and Haus Otto — as well as why its founder, Vanessa Heepen, almost didn’t go through with it.
More
05.04.23

Interiors

Thank This Couple For Bringing a Dose of Color to Berlin’s Interiors

Progressing from designing furniture for children to interiors for the whole family could easily result in spaces that were kitschy or too twee. But not in the hands of Berlin studio Jäll & Tofta, whose projects carry the joy and spirit of childhood whimsy, yet with a sophisticated, well-considered maturity. If you ever needed proof that colorful can be chic (which we didn’t, obviously), this is it.
More
09.14.22

Travel

Berlin Startup Raus Is Building Designer Cabins in the Woods that Let Tired City-Dwellers Become One With Nature

With its 170 square-foot bookable designer cabins, German startup Raus lets its guests leave the craziness of the city behind to experience being separated from endless trees and sky by a mere sliver of glass (without giving up the comforts of a proper mattress and shower). Its founders created the first few cabins themselves, negotiating deals with farmers outside Berlin to park the off-the-grid structures on their land, then commissioned architect Sigurd Larsen to envision model 2.0, which debuted this past spring.
More
07.07.22

Sighted

This Berlin-Based Furniture Brand Has All Your Color-Blocked Essentials Covered

Block colors, wavy pastels, and geometric glassware? Say no more. (Haaaave you seen our Pinterest?) Four years after founding his eponymous design brand, Berlin-based Moritz Bannach is expanding with a quartet of new offerings that build upon the bold simplicity of his first product: the Uno collection of dining/conference tables, which launched in 2018 and featured in our Saturday Selects. Bannach's latest design mimics Uno's strikingly simple planes of color and recalls the best of Memphis Design.
More
07.26.21

Sighted

With Prints Inspired By Art-Store Pen-Test Doodles, These Curtains Are ‘Free and Wild’

Sarah Illenberger has a talent for recontextualizing everyday items in ways that are deceptively simple, yet at the same time so clever that there's an irresistible kind of magic in it. The same is true for her new collaboration with Danish textile purveyor Kvadrat, a series of three vibrant curtain panels created by scanning the little pads of paper people test pens on in stationery stores — the unremarkable made remarkable, through little more than a flash of creative inspiration and a change in scale.
More
01.19.21

Interiors

This Berlin Restaurant Proves How Much Color Can Define a Space

We're featuring these photos because Lok6 boasts a new interiors concept by the Berlin-based duo Various Objects, but in fact the images show how minimal an intervention is necessary when color is the absolute star of a space. Nearly every photo is suffused with a kind of late-day warmth that arises from the restaurant's foundational materials — brick-red pigmented reinforced concrete, and structural steel that's been powder-coated to match.
More
09.19.20

Saturday Selects

Week of September 14, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: three new (ish) puffy chairs, a collection of graphic ceramic tiles by Nathalie du Pasquier, and a suite of styrofoam-and-resin floral furniture with millennial-weirdo vibes.
More
09.11.20

Up and Coming

A Berlin Duo Whose Marriage of Art, Design, and Craft Is More Literal Than Most

When creatives describe their work as blurring the boundaries between design and art, it's rare that the effect is quite so literal as it is in the case of Berlin's Opt Studios — not only because it's the shared practice of a textile and product designer and her painter and sculptor husband, but also because the works themselves look like abstract artworks that just so happen to be hanging out on rugs and side tables.
More
11.05.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Jose Dávila Exhibition in A Stunning Brutalist Church

If you've ever visited König Galerie in Berlin, which is housed in a renovated 1967 Brutalist church with a skylit concrete nave, you'll know that there are only a few places in the world to experience contemporary art in such a breathtaking setting. There are also only a few artists whose work would be quite so at home in that nave as Jose Dávila, the Mexican sculptor who trained as an architect and is known for his focus on space, balance, and proportion.
More
10.08.19

At Home With

Kim Bartelt’s Pastel Paper “Paintings” Are the Bedrock of Her Berlin Home

When Kim Bartelt was an art student at Parsons, and then a young set designer in New York, she would often collect the colored tissue paper that comes with clothing purchases from small boutiques, or wrapped around samples when calling in pieces for a photoshoot. The papers sat for years around her apartment in a giant Paul Smith bag — first in New York, then back home in Berlin — before eventually becoming the abstract "painting" that would become the basis for a body of work she's been creating for more than half a decade.
More