Berlin
GRAFT Berlin – Los Angeles

With undulant, folded planes, Graft animates the interior of Q!, a new hotel in Berlin, sensuously flowing walls into ceilings and furniture

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	Left to right: Thomas Willemeit, Wolfram Putz, Lars Krueckeberg
	Photo © Heipler Branier
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Look for luxury goods shops in any self-respecting European capital, and the immediate corollary, the “design hotel,” can’t be far away. Sure enough, in Berlin, around the corner from Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Cartier, a new hotel so chic its entrance carries no name proves the rule. But for those who know where to look, Q! isn’t hard to find. Within a relatively undistinguished gray facade, punched windows (of the sort commonly seen in this city) reveal the first hint that Q! stands apart from its neighbors in this high-rent district, just off the Kufürstendamm.

Flowing from the lobby into the lounge and restaurant, curvy, red-linoleum-clad surfaces glide seamlessly from floor to wall. Couches and built-in furniture similarly bear the mark of the architects, Graft, a young Los Angeles- and Berlin-based firm with a total of 20 employees. Its partners, Wolfgang Putz, Thomas Willemeit, and Lars Krückeberg, owe this commission more to Hollywood connections than German origins. Hotel operator Wolfgang Loock called them in 2002 after seeing an article on the Hollywood Hills studio they’d designed for actor Brad Pitt.

Throughout the 32,000-square-foot building, Graft succeeded in imposing a unified aesthetic. At Q!, continuous, streamlined surfaces wrap not only the street-level public areas but also the guest-room interiors, where the palette shifts to white against smoked-oak floors. Here, walls meld into desks and ceilings. Overhead, curved ceilings lightly printed with Christian Thomas’s photographs of a woman, aim to give these quarters what Putz calls a “cocoonlike feeling.”

Carefully thought out, the room designs favor an enveloping smoothness that does away with many everyday clues to designated function, such as door handles. Cupboards or light switches are not immediately visible. Though sleek wrappers seem to be de rigueur in new design hotels, Graft crafted the aesthetic skillfully, conveying a sense of high quality through good workmanship, despite the low budget. What looks like slate in the bathrooms, for example, is really black terra-cotta, and so forth.

Want the full story? Read the entire article in our September 2004 issue.
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