Wilmina – The Art of Staying
- Jun 4
- 7 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
How a former women’s prison became a quiet urban habitat — shaped by architecture, gardens, food, memory and the art of staying.
Somewhere along Berlin’s bustling Kantstraße, between neon-lit restaurants, corner stores and the city’s everyday chaos, sits a gate that is surprisingly easy to miss. If you don’t know what you are looking for, you will probably walk right past it — perhaps distracted by the scent of freshly baked sourdough and warm cinnamon buns drifting from Wilmina Brot.
Step through the large wrought-iron gate, however, and the city begins to fall away almost instantly.
From spring to autumn, the first courtyard feels like an oasis: ivy-covered brick walls, wild greenery climbing across surfaces, flowering shrubs, towering trees and café tables scattered beneath the foliage. It feels less like a hotel entrance than an overgrown urban garden, as if nature had quietly reclaimed this forgotten corner of Berlin.
Today, guests linger here over breakfast, coffee or an afternoon aperitif.
It is almost impossible to imagine that this was once a women’s prison.
Perhaps that is Wilmina’s greatest achievement. The past has neither been erased nor turned into a spectacle. It remains visible in preserved bars, brickwork, sealed doorways and narrow staircases, yet it no longer defines the place. For architects Grüntuch Ernst, the task was not to overwrite the building’s history, but to transform its meaning. Their approach was remarkably restrained.
In conversation, the architects describe their starting point as a question of return: how could a place that had been physically and socially closed off for decades be brought back into the city and into everyday life? During their first visits, they sensed both the oppressive weight of its history and something strangely enchanted — especially in the overgrown façades and the unusual silence behind Kantstraße.
Rather than replacing one narrative with another, they created the conditions for a new one to emerge within the existing structure.
The project, as they see it, was never about inventing a new identity from scratch. It was about adding another layer of time — with as few interventions as possible and with maximum respect for the existing substance.
What was once a place of forced confinement has become a place of voluntary retreat.
And this transformation extends far beyond the hotel itself.
What makes Wilmina particularly compelling is that its appeal is not limited to rooms, design or hospitality in the narrow sense. The bakery, café, apartments, restaurant, gardens and cultural programme are not additional features attached to a hotel. Instead, they form a small urban ecosystem that feels deeply rooted in the neighbourhood, yet also offers a surprising sense of retreat.
This coherence is not accidental. Wilmina is not only a project by Grüntuch Ernst; it is also owned, operated and continually shaped by the family and the team around them. Their children became part of different layers of the ensemble — from the development of the Amtsalon to the hotel opening and Wilmina Brot. In this sense, Wilmina feels less like a completed architectural work than a living structure: one that continues to be held, adjusted and inhabited by the people who imagined it.
You move through lounges, reading corners, fireplaces and gardens as though you were moving through the home of an exceptionally thoughtful friend.
Time slows down long before you reach your room.
Arrive early? No problem.
Spend an hour at Lotta, the all-day café nestled between the courtyards. Have a coffee and a pastry from the bakery, sit in the library, or find a quiet table in the garden. Upstairs, a sauna, timber terrace and small outdoor pool open towards Berlin’s rooftops.
There is already a great deal to experience before the hotel stay has officially begun.
Only on the way towards the guest rooms does the former prison reveal itself more clearly.
The circulation routes still follow the original building’s logic. Former cell doors remain. Passageways have been opened, rooms have been combined, walls have been removed. Where prisoners could once almost touch both sides of a cell with outstretched arms, light-filled rooms now feel unexpectedly generous.
One of the most remarkable architectural gestures is deceptively simple: the windows.
Originally positioned high above eye level, they were extended downwards, bringing daylight into the rooms while retaining the historic bars as quiet reminders of the building’s former use.
For Grüntuch Ernst, light became the emotional counterweight to the building’s former darkness. Enlarged windows, lowered stone sills and new visual connections to the courtyards allow the historic structure to remain legible, while fundamentally changing how it is experienced. The cell doors, galleries and original order of the prison are still readable — but they have been reinterpreted through openness, daylight and the presence of gardens.
Inside, pale timber, natural textiles and understated furnishings create an atmosphere that feels more domestic than hotel-like. Books await on bedside tables. A homemade brownie and apple chips offer a small welcome. Even the scent of the soap seems to communicate the same message: Slow down. Stay a little longer.
And somehow, you do.
As evening falls, the atmosphere shifts again.
The Lovis Bar is darker and more intimate. Its focus is not on display, but on carefully developed house-made ingredients, quiet flavour and a sense of restraint. Beyond it lies the restaurant itself.
The former prison courtyard now opens onto a spacious dining room, framed by historic brick walls and large windows looking out towards the gardens. As darkness falls outside, the glass begins to mirror the interior. Suspended lights seem to multiply between reflection and reality, hovering in the room like a second architecture.
The effect is almost cinematic.
Like the architecture, Sophia Rudolph’s cooking relies on restraint rather than spectacle. Vegetables take centre stage, accompanied by carefully sourced seasonal ingredients, thoughtful wines and an absence of unnecessary embellishment.
Lovis is therefore not simply the restaurant attached to the hotel. Set in the covered former lock courtyard, it translates the architectural attitude of Wilmina into another medium: seasonal, regionally grounded, precise, generous without display. Food, light and spatial memory begin to speak the same language.
Perhaps more than anywhere else, it is here that the essence of Wilmina becomes clear.
This is not a place built around design as an aesthetic exercise. It is a place built around coherence.
What makes Wilmina so remarkable is not one particular architectural feature, but the way in which Grüntuch Ernst have expanded the idea of architecture beyond the building itself. The bakery, café, apartments, restaurant, gardens and cultural programme all feel like expressions of the same attitude rather than individual components.
Wilmina Brot brings the almost forgotten tradition of the hotel bakery back into the present — while also opening the ensemble to the neighbourhood. Lotta, the day bar on Pestalozzistraße, works as an informal urban threshold. The Carlotta Apartments extend the idea of staying into longer rhythms. The Amtsalon adds an independent cultural layer, with its own entrance on Kantstraße and a programme that moves between art, architecture and design. Each element has its own address and function, but all of them belong to the same cosmos.
Here, architecture, hospitality, landscape, food and culture do not operate as separate layers. They belong to the same narrative.
Perhaps that is why leaving Wilmina feels so difficult.
Not because there is so much to do.
It is because everything belongs together.
The place’s history never disappears. However, it no longer dictates what the place can become. Instead, it forms the foundation for a new chapter — one written by architects and hosts, neighbours, bakers, cooks, artists, and guests alike.
Wilmina is therefore less a completed hotel than an authored habitat: a place kept alive by architecture, use, care and the people who continue to inhabit its idea. This continuing authorship is the subject of a separate Place Keepers conversation with Grüntuch Ernst — on transformation, family, light, hospitality and the quiet work of keeping a place alive.
In a city that often rewards the loudest voices, Wilmina achieves something rarer: it makes you want to stay.
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What this place reveals
Coherence is always quieter than concept.
Transformation is not the opposite of authorship. Sometimes it is its most precise form.
A hotel can be more than a place to sleep when architecture, operation, food, culture and neighbourhood are thought together from the beginning.
The most convincing hospitality does not simply welcome guests. It gives a place back to the city.
Location Berlin-Charlottenburg
Architecture Grüntuch Ernst Architekten
Opened 2022
Further Threads from Wilmina
The bakery anchors the ensemble in the everyday life of Kantstraße — not only serving hotel guests, but bringing sourdough, pastries and a slower rhythm to the neighbourhood.
An open, low-threshold day bar on Pestalozzistraße, conceived less as a hotel amenity than as a small urban room for spontaneous visits.
Set in the former lock courtyard, Lovis extends the spatial attitude of Wilmina into food: seasonal, restrained, regionally grounded and quietly atmospheric.
A transdisciplinary cultural space for art, architecture and design, with its own entrance on Kantstraße — extending Wilmina beyond hospitality into a public cultural programme.
Kantstraße
One of Berlin’s most layered urban arteries: international, dense, restless, full of restaurants, shops, everyday life and unexpected cultural traces.
Lietzensee
A nearby walk that extends Wilmina’s inner garden logic into the wider Charlottenburg landscape.
Two addresses for those who want to follow Berlin’s architectural conversations further.
Cultural and social coordinates around Charlottenburg and beyond — places that belong to the wider Berlin field in which Wilmina quietly participates.
Wilmina is inseparable from the work of Almut Grüntuch-Ernst and Armand Grüntuch. Their transformation of the former courthouse and women’s prison did not erase the existing structure, but changed its direction. The project is a study in how architecture can soften without sentimentalising, preserve without freezing, and create a new social life inside a difficult typology. For FAJN., Grüntuch Ernst Architekten are not simply the architects of Wilmina, but key figures in understanding how adaptive reuse can become cultural hospitality.
The light installations by Bocci add one of Wilmina’s most memorable counterpoints. Designed through the language of handblown glass and atmospheric suspension, the glowing spheres interrupt the severity of the former prison architecture with something fragile, organic and almost weightless. In the former courtyard, staircases and cultural spaces, the lights do not simply illuminate. They act as spatial installations, creating reflection, repetition and a dreamlike softness against brick, bars and concrete memory.
A wine list can quietly reveal the cultural orientation of a place. The connection to Weingut Harkamp opens a thread beyond Berlin — towards biodynamic wine, low-intervention thinking and a different understanding of hospitality as care for origin, process and landscape. It is a small but telling detail: Wilmina’s coherence does not end with interiors. It continues through what is poured, served and chosen.
