In Berlin, the designers behind Berghain reimagine the house as a club

At Berghain, photography is not allowed. For years, Berlin’s most iconic techno club has protected its image by banning phones and snapshots, building its myth more on direct experience and word of mouth than on a shared visual archive. That is precisely why the images of this Kreuzberg apartment carry a certain paradox: in a domestic setting, they reveal an aesthetic that, in its original context, remains largely invisible. This is no coincidence. The studio Karhard, which designed the project, also created the interiors of Berghain twenty years ago—the former East Berlin power plant turned global temple of techno culture. Industrial brutalism, artificial light treated as material, sound conceived as architecture, and the notoriously selective entrance policy became part of the club’s spatial device. In the 2000s, the venue stood as one of the clearest symbols of the city’s post-Wall energy. Today the scene has evolved, but club culture remains one of the languages through which Berlin continues to redefine its cultural identity.

This apartment emerges directly from that trajectory—not as a nostalgic replica of a dance floor, but as an informal living space designed for hosting friends, throwing parties, and listening to electronic music. Rather than imitating a club, it translates some of its core principles: spatial continuity instead of a sequence of closed rooms, radical control of artificial lighting, and industrial materials handled with near-scenographic precision. Originally conceived as a partial renovation, the intervention evolved into a total redesign that reshaped both the layout and the character of the home. Today the apartment includes a living area, three bedrooms—one more than in the original configuration—and two bathrooms distributed across roughly 100 square meters, a surface slightly reduced by the installation of an acoustic insulation system. Here, a technical detail becomes a statement of intent: the house as a place where sound is integral to architecture.

A curved glass-block wall separates the entrance from the living area without breaking spatial continuity, filtering light and turning it into an active design element. At night, an integrated LED system animates the surface, creating a luminous landscape that echoes the controlled atmospheres of large converted industrial spaces. The kitchen, concealed behind brushed steel surfaces, takes on the appearance of an operational zone closer to a bar counter than to a traditional domestic environment. In the bedrooms, a dark, compact palette dominates; in the bathrooms, materials and finishes are treated with almost monomaterial consistency. More than a stylistic exercise, the overall composition delivers a precise vocabulary: austere, controlled, industrial.

In a city that has turned nightlife into a form of culture and adaptive industrial architecture into its visual language, this house becomes more than a residential project. It is the private translation of a collective imaginary—the visual narrative of a place that, by design, refuses to be photographed.