Wilmina – The Art of Staying

How a former prison became a quiet urban ecosystem of architecture, food, gardens and cultural hospitality.

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 Almut Grüntuch-Ernst and Armand Grüntuch, the task was not to overwrite the building’s history, but to transform its meaning.

Rather than replacing one narrative with another, they created the conditions for a new one to emerge within the existing structure.

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. They form a small urban ecosystem — deeply rooted in the neighbourhood, yet unexpectedly removed from it.

You move through lounges, reading corners, fireplaces and gardens as though 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.

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.

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.

Architecture, hospitality, landscape, food and culture do not operate as separate layers here.

They belong to the same narrative.

Perhaps that is why leaving Wilmina feels so difficult. Not because there is so much to do. But because everything belongs together.

The place’s history never disappears. It no longer dictates what the place can become, but it remains present as foundation, friction and memory.

In a city that often rewards the loudest voices, Wilmina achieves something rarer: it makes you want to stay.

///

What this place reveals

Coherence is always quieter than concept.

Format Place Reading

Location Berlin-Charlottenburg

Architecture Grüntuch Ernst Architekten

Opened 2022

wilmina.com

Further Threads from Wilmina

Wilmina Brot

The smell of sourdough already begins to explain Wilmina before the architecture does. Wilmina Brot is not a decorative hotel bakery, but part of the place’s larger rhythm: a return to time, craft and daily ritual. Its breads are made with natural sourdough, old grain varieties and a deliberate slowness that mirrors the atmosphere of the hotel itself. It also extends Wilmina beyond its guests, giving the neighbourhood a reason to enter the ensemble through something as ordinary — and as essential — as bread.

Lovis

Lovis Restaurant & Bar is where Wilmina’s architectural restraint meets the table. Set in the former prison courtyard, the restaurant does not try to compete with the building’s history. Instead, Sophia Rudolph’s cooking follows a similar logic: seasonal, precise, vegetable-forward and quietly confident. The room, with its brick walls, garden views and reflective glass, turns dinner into a spatial experience. It is less about performance than alignment — between food, architecture, light and atmosphere.

Grüntuch Ernst

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.

Bocci

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.

Weingut Harkamp

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.

893 Ryōtei

A few minutes from Wilmina, 893 Ryōtei belongs to another side of Kantstraße: hidden, cinematic, surprising and deliberately hard to read from the outside. Its interior world, designed by ALLEN KAUFMANN with strong visual tension, makes it an interesting neighbour rather than a direct extension of Wilmina. Where Wilmina turns retreat into softness, 893 Ryōtei works with secrecy, contrast and urban intensity. Together, they reveal how layered Berlin’s City West can be when read through food and spatial atmosphere.

Clärchens Ballhaus

Clärchens Ballhaus opens a different Berlin thread: history not as retreat, but as movement, music and social ritual. Its renovated restaurant, garden and legendary ballroom connect memory with public life in a way that resonates with Wilmina’s broader question: How can historic places be reactivated without becoming stage sets? Clärchens is louder, more performative and more public — but it belongs to the same conversation about care, continuity and the return of cultural rooms. Design by BASD.

The Knast

The Knast in Berlin-Lichterfelde offers a useful counterpoint to Wilmina. It, too, works with the charged typology of a former women’s prison, but translates it into a more theatrical world of dining, bar culture, events, art and nocturnal intensity. As a further thread, it helps sharpen what makes Wilmina distinct: not the prison-to-hotel transformation itself, but the unusual quietness, restraint and garden-led hospitality with which that transformation has been handled. Architecture & Interior Design by César Taccari.