Grüntuch Ernst about the Continuing Life of Wilmina

On transforming a former women’s prison into an urban habitat — and why architecture, operation and care cannot be separated.

There are projects that seem finished when the last construction detail is resolved. And there are others that only begin to reveal themselves once people start inhabiting them.

Wilmina belongs to the second category. It continues my Place Reading of Wilmina — a story about courtyards, light, bread, memory and the art of turning a closed place back into part of the city.

For Almut Grüntuch-Ernst and Armand Grüntuch, the former women’s prison hidden behind Berlin’s Kantstraße was never simply a building to be converted. It was a closed urban fragment, a place physically and socially removed from the city for decades. When they first entered the site, they encountered an almost impossible contradiction: the oppressive presence of confinement and, at the same time, something overgrown, quiet and strangely enchanted.

This tension became the starting point.

The question was not how to erase the past, nor how to turn it into a dramatic architectural narrative. The question was how to bring the place back into the city — and into everyday life.

A new layer of time

Grüntuch Ernst describe the transformation of Wilmina less as reinvention than as continuation. The former prison, with its cells, galleries, doors, courtyards and heavy brick structures, was not treated as material to be neutralised. Instead, the architects added another layer of time.

The existing order remains visible. Former cell doors still mark the rhythm of the rooms. Galleries and window formats recall the building’s previous logic. Narrowness, weight and enclosure are not denied. But they are countered by light, openness and garden.

For the architects, light became one of the most important tools of transformation. Windows were enlarged and lowered, allowing views into the courtyards and bringing daylight into spaces that were once defined by distance from the outside world. The historic structure remains legible, but the emotional register has changed.

What was once a place of isolation has become a place of retreat.

That distinction matters. Wilmina does not romanticise its past. But neither does it leave the past untouched. It asks what architecture can do when history is too present to ignore and too complex to simply display.

Architects, owners, hosts

The project might never have happened in this form had Grüntuch Ernst remained only the architects.

Originally, they had been commissioned by another client to develop part of the site. The prison itself was considered economically difficult: protected as a listed building, spatially powerful, but with little conventional usable area. When the original client lost interest, the architects’ own curiosity grew.

At some point, the project required more than design competence. It required responsibility.

By becoming owners and operators, Almut Grüntuch-Ernst and Armand Grüntuch were able to think architecture, use, programme and atmosphere together. The hotel, restaurant, bakery, day bar, apartments and cultural spaces did not have to be added to one another as separate commercial units. They could grow into an ensemble.

This is perhaps one of the reasons Wilmina feels so unusually coherent. It was not only designed as a place. It is still being held as one.

Architecture, here, is not separate from operation. The way people arrive, eat, move, rest, work, read, meet or withdraw belongs to the same authorship as the walls, courtyards and windows.

A family structure, not a family label

Wilmina is often described as family-run. In many hospitality contexts, that phrase can sound like a soft marketing code. Here, it is more literal.

The children of Almut Grüntuch-Ernst and Armand Grüntuch grew up with the transformation and became involved in different layers of the project. Gwendolyn helped shape the concept in the pre-opening phase and supported the development of the Amtsalon. Gordian accompanied the hotel opening and helped build the team. Gustava took on Wilmina Brot, the bakery that has become one of the most important everyday interfaces between the ensemble and the neighbourhood.

Yet the architects are careful not to frame Wilmina only as a family story. The team, they emphasise, is the heart of the house. It is the people working there every day who translate the project’s attitude into hospitality.

This is where Wilmina becomes more than an architectural transformation. It becomes a living structure — one that depends on care, continuity and the ability to adjust without losing its point of view.

The Wilmina cosmos

What began as the transformation of a former prison has become a small urban cosmos.

The hotel occupies the quiet inner world of the block. Lovis Restaurant & Bar sits in the covered former lock courtyard, where brick walls, garden views and a dense installation of light create a space that feels protected and expansive at once. With Sophia Rudolph’s seasonal, regionally grounded cooking, the architectural attitude continues in another language: restrained, precise, generous without display.

Lotta, the day bar on Pestalozzistraße, opens the ensemble towards the everyday life of the city. It is deliberately informal — a place for spontaneous visits rather than programmed hospitality.

Wilmina Brot brings back the almost forgotten tradition of the hotel bakery, while also serving the neighbourhood with naturally leavened bread and pastries. It requires time, craft and space — qualities that mirror the wider project.

The Carlotta Apartments add another rhythm of staying. More contemporary in expression, but connected through scale, materiality and garden, they extend the ensemble without imitating the historic substance.

The Amtsalon, finally, gives Wilmina a cultural dimension beyond hospitality. As a transdisciplinary space for art, architecture and design, with its own entrance on Kantstraße, it allows the place to remain porous: connected to local scenes, international visitors and public exchange.

Each part has its own address and function. Together, they form one habitat.

Transformation as future task

Wilmina also reflects a broader shift in the work of Grüntuch Ernst.

After decades of building in Berlin — from inner-city densification to schools, housing and cultural projects — the architects see the future of the city increasingly in transformation rather than expansion. The question is no longer only what can be built, but what existing structures can become.

For them, working with existing buildings is not an act of repair. It is a demanding form of design. It requires reading what is already there, recognising cultural and material value, identifying potentials that are not immediately visible, and finding uses that allow buildings to live again.

At Wilmina, this also meant sustainability through continuation: minimal interventions, reuse of demolished materials, a low-tech approach to building services, renatured courtyards and a long-term programme that gives the site social relevance. The German Sustainability Award for Architecture recognised precisely this approach: not sustainability as an added layer, but as a way of thinking with what already exists.

In this sense, Wilmina is not only a hotel. It is an argument for Weiterbauen — for continuing rather than replacing.

Kantstraße as context

Wilmina could not exist in quite the same way anywhere else.

Kantstraße, in Berlin-Charlottenburg, is one of the city’s most layered urban arteries. It is dense, international, restless and full of everyday exchange: restaurants, shops, cultural institutions, small businesses, bookshops, galleries, repair places, food from many parts of the world.

For Grüntuch Ernst, this context is not a backdrop. It is part of the project’s meaning.

Wilmina does not function as a sealed hotel world. Through Wilmina Brot, Lotta, Lovis and the Amtsalon, it connects with the neighbourhood in different degrees of openness.

It allows guests to withdraw without disappearing from the city.

Perhaps this is the quiet intelligence of the place: it does not resolve the tension between retreat and urban life. It holds it.

What remains

Asked what good architecture means to them, Grüntuch Ernst speak of function and sensuality, zeitgeist and timelessness, social space and private retreat, nature and artefact.

Wilmina contains all of these pairs.

It is intimate and urban. Historic and contemporary. Private and public. Heavy and light. It carries memory, but it is not trapped by it. It offers refuge, but remains connected to the street. It is a place designed by architects, but kept alive by hosts, bakers, cooks, cultural workers, neighbours and guests.

This is why Wilmina feels different from many carefully designed hotels.

It is not simply a place that was once transformed.

It is a place still being transformed — quietly, daily, through use.

And perhaps that is the role of true place keepers: not to preserve a place as it was, nor to reinvent it beyond recognition, but to keep adding the right layers of time.

///

Grüntuch Ernst Architekten