That Berlin has one of Europe’s most vibrant contemporary arts scenes is hardly news — but now, a key group of creators are moving outside the city center to build ethically motivated, innovatively designed retreats, concert venues and private homes. Native Berliners often describe a quest for gemütlichkeit — German for a space that inspires cheerful serenity — as a defining element in Berlin’s characteristic aesthetic and life-philosophy. When placed outside the city’s famously spacious old apartments, this sense of tranquility is supposedly achieved through considerate and conscientious design that fits into, rather than overpowers, the surrounding environment.
An architectural firm that has mastered the demands of artsy Berlin’s transition to country life is 2D+. One small, recycled steel-and-wood home that the firm built in Tellerhäuser is surprisingly hospitable and nods at its residents’ urban roots. In Wandlitz, a municipality about 15 miles north of Berlin, the firm designed a home for Anja and Falko Drews, the two founding partners of a Berlin modeling agency, who moved to a plot too small for a conventional country house with their baby. 2D+ eliminated dead space by using embedded furniture and integrating the support structure into the insulation level to maximize the construction. In the humble 840-square-foot space, they managed to fit a revolving fireplace, a combination kitchen-dining-living-room area, a spa with a sauna, a master bedroom and a long, covered deck that during the warmer months expands the space into the lawn. With grayed larch-wood paneling outside and whitewashed oak indoors, both merging harmoniously with the house’s natural context, this home is a perfectly private and serene nest.
Elsewhere, visitors can absorb the calm and creativity achieved with 2D+’s design without moving too far from Berlin’s city center. The opera singer Reinhard Hagen has turned his Brandenburg barn into an intimate concert stage he calls Musikscheune Vielitz. Named after the lake where it is located, the raw-wood paneled hall draws established and aspiring singers and audiences away from Berlin’s opera houses. With floor-to-ceiling windows facing the lake, Hagen’s red-brick barn feels entirely open. And on another lake in Brandenburg, Louisa Löwenstein, a brand consultant who currently invites writers, artists and other creative people into her Berlin apartment as part of the PenTales Hemingway Room project, is opening a retreat suitable for 20 residents, and which includes workshops and studios. Retaining the integrity of the original barn while adding vintage but functional decorative touches, like an original Singer sewing machine from the 1920s, Löwenstein is continuing something of a family legacy; her aunt converted an old train station in Biesenthal, 30 minutes from Berlin, into a local cultural and yoga center. “I come across more and more people feeling that they needed more space, in a literal but also spiritual sense, to develop their ideas and bring them to the next level,” Löwenstein explains. “Berlin, as vibrant and great as it is, sometimes just confines you.”
