Leisha Jones checks out one of the city’s most innovative accommodation projects – the Hüttenpalast.
Photo by Jan Brockhaus
Passing through the leafy courtyard out the back of an unassuming Neükolln café, the exterior of this1910 vacuum cleaner factory belies the whimsy that awaits behind its doors.
Inside, the hushed air and low glow of fairy lights evoke the feeling of entering a clandestine clubhouse. You feel as though you have stumbled upon a place where you should talk in a whisper, or where you are not allowed, but the reality is quite the opposite. Silke Lorenzen and Sarah Vollmer like to call their recently-opened hotel, “the agency for everything”, and everybody is welcome.
Hüttenpalast recreates the joy of camping, with reworked caravans and self-made wooden huts filling the lofty space. Since opening in May, the room within a room concept has created much more than its makers imagined possible.
Having spent the past five years working for a luxury event agency – with big companies, big money and big people – Silke was ready for a change, “I wasn’t really feeling good about what I was doing. I liked my work, but I didn’t see any reason to it. I wanted to do something that would give me more purpose.”
In autumn 2010, she decided it was time to put her dreams into action and asked long-time friend and partner Sarah – a designer who uses her hands to create fashion, food and furniture – to join her. They began with a stroll through their Neukölln neighbourhood, where they have lived for eight years, and noticed the one thing missing was a place to sleep.
Rather than setting out to create a gimmicky hotel for campers who prefer to stay clean, dry and mosquito-bite free, the concept was born from a desire to preserve the natural beauty and grandeur of the site they acquired. Bored by the idea of creating just another ‘normal’ hotel, they decided to fill the space with wooden huts. When they thought of putting wheels on them so the space would be more tangible, they realised they were reinventing something that already existed – a caravan.
Photo by Jan Brockhaus
The result is a vast warehouse filled with three wooden huts and three old caravans, each with room for two to three guests. Mismatched camping furniture, vintage tables and chairs fill the common spaces where guests can mix with other ‘campers’.
In the centre of the warehouse is a tall, twiggy tree, festooned with fairy lights. Much like the campfire is the centre of the camping ground, this is where coffee and tea is served in the morning and fresh croissants are hung from the branches in white paper bags.
Each caravan has been stripped down and restored to reveal its raw charm, and decorated by a different artist with unique, changeable features. The “heartbreaker”, garlanded with little red curtains, has pop out frames which can be filled to create a mural or display several smaller pictures; while the “little sister’s” walls are covered with white wooden blocks, meticulously whittled down and wedged into the walls like a jigsaw puzzle.
The interiors are designed to constantly evolve, so that both the guests and the owners don’t become bored. Last month, they opened six new hotel rooms in a separate area to accommodate guests who want a little more privacy.
Everything has been pulled together from all corners of Berlin – from markets, friends and even their own dumpster. When they took over the building a lot of scrap was left behind which Silke and Sarah have turned into useful objects and furniture for the hotel. Such as the bar in the café, constructed from glass bricks destined for the trash and an old wooden structure – which used to be the entrance to the old factory and still sports original features like the bell, window and old door – has formed the basis for one of the cabins.
When local artists living and working in the area heard of the hotel, they all wanted to participate and the project unfolded naturally. “It was always our plan from the beginning to do it with friends and all the creative people we have around us,” says Sarah. “It was a fantastic thing. We came up with this idea and then it was like magic. A lot of people just wanted to be a part of it. We didn’t search for them, they came to us.”
Photo by Jan Brockhaus
During the process, people from all over the world contributed: an architect from Venezuela; a young painter from France; and an American expat living locally who provided a distinct lighting solution for one of the caravans. As the hotel continues to take shape, Silke and Sarah hope more artists will contribute, so the surroundings are growing and changing all the time.
“There are many young artists and designers in this area who often don’t have a gallery or some place to show their work. A lot of people from all over the world come here and I would love this to be a platform for those artists,” says Sarah. “It’s a wonderful thing for both sides, the designer has an audience and the people who sleep here have the chance to take something away with them.”
Hüttenpalast has been attracting a diverse mix of visitors, from a nostalgic older couple who came with a picnic to celebrate their wedding anniversary, to Berliners looking to discover a neighbourhood they might rarely visit. The open plan layout encourages them to get to know each other, creating a microcosm of society. Sarah and Silke explained a moment where they found themselves in a circle of 12 people, all from different backgrounds and cultures, who stayed up well into the night sharing stories. They all had one thing in common – a desire to do something different and connect with like-minded people. “We thought we were just writing something in a business plan,” says Silke. “In theory it sounded good, but whether it would happen, we didn’t really know. But it has happened.”
Photo by Jan Brockhaus
After seeing the garden, which connects the hotel to the café, people from the neighbourhood began bringing seeds and cut offs from their own gardens, resulting in a lush enclave – where locals mix with guests – brimming with herbs, flowers and young vegetable plants. Growing up in the 80s, Sarah’s mother ran bio co-ops and taught her all about the seasons, how to grow vegetables and produce food by hand.
She hopes to continue this philosophy at the Hüttenpalast café, where the food is mostly vegetarian and everything is handmade, from the preserves to the quiches and cakes. Currently, home grown herbs and flowers are used on the menu, but as the years and seasons progress Sarah plans to make the garden a more functional component of the hotel.
Sarah and Silke hope Hüttenpalast will not only become a gathering point for their community, but a community in itself. Since opening, they have learnt more about their neighbourhood with every day that passes, and it is these little things they hope to pass on to visitors to Berlin. They encourage guests to walk or bike through the city and discover all the small corners of every neighbourhood, hoping to send them off with a little more than a smiling snapshot in front of the East Side Gallery.
Hüttenpalast
Hobrechtstraße 66
12047 Berlin
T: 030 37 30 58 06
About The Author
Part-time journalist, full-time drifter, Leisha Jones from New Zealand has lived all over the world before finally falling for Berlin. She writes to finance her vices: eating, drinking and wanderlust.
