Pastel Transformation at Berlin’s Locke at East Side Gallery

Grzywinski+Pons’ latest project, Locke at East Side Gallery, reimagines the Berlin Wall’s most iconic stretch not as a site of division, but as a liminal space designed for connection.

Set in Friedrichshain along the Spree River, the 176-room hotel integrates co-working spaces, a café, bar, lounge, and event areas into a unified architectural response to one of the world’s most symbolic urban edges.

GALLERY  

The East Side Gallery — where murals now line the Wall’s longest surviving section — became a powerful catalyst for the hotel’s design. Grzywinski+Pons embraced this paradox, shaping the hotel as a physical and conceptual threshold. The ground floor opens through the Wall itself, linking city and river while housing social zones that reference Berlin’s fragmented yet integrated identity. These spaces blur boundaries between public and private, past and present, offering a microcosm of the surrounding city.

Architecturally, the design celebrates contrast. Exposed structural concrete, recycled sand-lime bricks and lofty, industrial volumes serve as a base for softer insertions — ombre curtains, timber joinery, and fluted demi-walls. Plant life cascades overhead, while high-pile rugs and handmade ceramics lend warmth. A series of sculptural totems nod to the former BT-6 watchtowers, subverting their symbolism through art and form.

Guest rooms extend the theme of layered duality. North-facing suites overlook the animated streetscape and East Side murals; those to the south offer serene views across the river to Kreuzberg. Within, timber and kiln-formed glass walls integrate wardrobes, kitchens, and bathrooms, acting as spatial organisers and symbolic thresholds. Smoked black glass, concrete softened by powdery finishes, and textural furnishings in turmeric and pastel complete the nuanced palette.

All furniture, custom-designed by the studio, furthers the sense of intimate materiality. Lighting is atmospheric and purposeful — grazing, pooling, and always supporting the hotel’s ethos of togetherness, whether shared or solitary.

Locke at East Side Gallery doesn’t just sit within Berlin’s history — it interrogates and honours it, crafting a hotel that feels at once reverent and radical.

Images by Nicholas Worley via ArchDaily

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