Redesign of the Berlin Café "Bierhimmel"

Oranienstraße 183
10999 Berlin-Kreuzberg

Client: Private

The Café has been sold in 2015 and the interior has been destroyed.

Café Bierhimmel is a popular meeting-place in the Oranienstrasse quarter of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. Frequented by people from the neighbourhood as a communal living room, it also serves as a warm-up venue for the late-night clubbing scene at the weekend. Restyling the café gave me an opportunity to design new wall lamps and tabletops. The motifs of the “inlaid pictures” in the front room reflect the varied impressions that might strike a café visitor, like a cinematic kaleidoscope of scenes observed in the street through the “screen” of the café’s large window, or the fleeting images glimpsed as one casually leafs through a magazine.

Wolf von Waldow, 2010

Article in architecture magazine AIT[(6/2010)

Pressinformation in german – Download

Build your own "Bierhimmel" – Download

Article Tagesspiegel 12.3.2010:

Finally, Tears Cake Again

Miracles happen again and again. They can occur today or tomorrow, as Katja Ebstein already knew. In this case, it happened today. In Kreuzberg, at Oranienstraße 183, the much-loved Bierhimmel reopens this Friday. Café, pub, bar, and meeting place. Even though no sign is yet hanging and hammering is still going on inside, the good news had already spread through the neighborhood the day before: a small note on the front door read “Hurrah!” scribbled by someone.

It had cut to the heart when Bierhimmel closed at the end of the year. Old Kreuzberg was shocked – not only the gay and lesbian crowd, for whom the café had been a meeting point for around twenty years, but also the students, local neighbors, everyone whose living room in the afternoon or pre-party station in the evening was the calm, family-like place without laptops. Especially since, at the same time, another meeting spot for people with free days, the Café Jenseits at Heinrichplatz, also shut down. Rumors circulated about rising rents, gentrification, and the usual capitalist shenanigans. In Bierhimmel’s case, the notoriously gruff-but-charming landlady Claudia Ullmann simply had no more desire to run the place.

“The property manager is a really nice guy,” says Christian Raschke, the new owner of Bierhimmel. Raschke is 52, a trained driving instructor, has lived in Kreuzberg for 25 years, and is one of the people who used to visit Bierhimmel in the afternoons. For the cakes. No café on Oranienstraße has better homemade cakes. The property manager offered him the lease right on the street. Raschke, the bald man with the St. Pauli cap, is well-known in the neighborhood. He runs the concert ticket office KoKa 36 and the T-shirt shop Fantastic on the corner of Adalbertstraße. With Bierhimmel, his businesses are slowly growing into a Kreuzberg-style empire. Raschke rolls his eyes and first greets a craftsman. Also a friend, of course. He doesn’t care for terms like “godfather” or “empire.” But keeping Kreuzberg affordable matters to him. His rent – around €2,000 for 140 square meters—remains the same, and a big slice of Tears Cake, the old Bierhimmel bestseller, will still cost €2.60.

The kitchen already smells wonderful. Bettina, gray-streaked braid and white apron, baked the cakes in the old Bierhimmel and now bakes them in the new one. The staff has stayed the same. Even the girls arranging the new, massive bar have been waiting tables here for years. They say many people didn’t know where to go in the last few months without the café. “Bierhimmel was always Bierhimmel,” is their cryptic local description.

Wolf von Waldow, the artist who designed the wallpapers, lamps, and tables for the freshly spruced-up café, had to cry when the old Bierhimmel closed. After all, he celebrated his wedding there. And: “Baking is my hobby.” Interestingly, even in the new Bierhimmel, everyone talks more about the cake than the beer. He has boldly redesigned his prematurely lost home anyway: apart from the L-shape, smoking lounge, and mosaic floor, nothing resembles the old worn-out café. “Kreuzberg has also changed in the last 20 years,” says von Waldow.

Christian Raschke agrees, noting that his own place still feels too new and stylish. “But that will change on its own,” he says, hoping for the return of the old, genuinely tolerant crowd as well as new patrons. It is quite possible that Bierhimmel will once again serve as a living room in the afternoons and pre-party station in the evenings on Oranienstraße. Old Kreuzberg can at least breathe a sigh of relief. Miracles happen – even if it’s a New-Kreuzberg miracle.

(Originally published in the printed Tagesspiegel on March 12, 2010)