An interesting article on the Irish Times…yes in real estate “perspective” is everything, especially if you are a value rather than a growth investor. Berlin had it bubbly times in the 90s after the reunification and in the early 2000s…true, in 2006-2007 there were still people hoping to do a quick buck in Berlin but I would say confined to a few overpriced areas…the big bubble had burst years before. On location, my favourite theme of discussion, the author is very effective in describing the issue in Berlin:

“…location is even more crucial here than anywhere else. The city always had an unusual structure as a collection of villages, but wartime destruction and Cold War division has left the geography even more out of whack. It’s still very much a bipolar city with two areas offering the most robust safety net for investors: the Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg areas of the former East and the south-western neighbourhoods of the former West”.

Ich bin ein property investor: is it the right time to buy in Berlin?

Twenty years after the fall of the Wall and after two property bubbles, prospects for the Berlin market are steady, Irish developers operating there tell Derek Scallly.

IN THE property business, everything is a matter of perspective and the bursting bubble around Europe has put Berlin’s property market in a whole new light.

The reputation of the German capital has swung between two extremes in recent years: what was once a steady, if unspectacular, investment location became, almost overnight, the darling for hordes of European investors following the Pied Piper of media hype.

As Irish, Danish and Icelandic investors piled in, prices began to rise and the natives got restless.

But nothing unusual lasts long: speculators were sent packing with the credit crunch, returning the market to Irish investors and developers who got in early and were clever enough to change with the times.

Today around half a dozen Irish operators in Berlin are evolving with the market, developing ambitious projects aimed not at foreign investors but at the German domestic market.

While the rest of Europe fizzles, the crisis has separated the investor men from speculator boys and made Berlin’s solidity more attractive than ever.

“We’ve had people coming to us who invested in Bulgaria, Spain, Britain, everywhere, and the only market where property is still worth what people paid for it a year or two ago – even a little more – is Germany,” says Adrian O’Sullivan, managing partner of European Property Investments (EPI).

Based in Berlin and Limerick, the company has evolved in the last five years from selling to managing properties as well as investment funds.

“The confidence in 2005 was incredible, nothing was too big for Irish investors,” remembers O’Sullivan. That Celtic Tiger confidence gave the Irish a head start in Berlin, he says: where the Germans saw problem sites, Irish people saw opportunities. But there was another extreme, too.

“When we did syndicates we’d have people calling up, sending cheques in the post without even knowing us,” he said, happy those days are gone.

Today his company has many deals on the go, but the headline project is a 20-storey office block and hotel complex on a site near Alexanderplatz, in the eastern city centre. Bought with 90 Irish investors in 2006, the economic crisis caused the original German financing to fall through; a new German bank stepped in, France’s Accor group agreed to occupy the hotel and the development is on course to open in a year’s time.

Today EPI has moved into consultancy, joint ventures with partners and operates property funds with equity stakes in almost ?????? its investments.

It is also running an income generator fund, with a mix of residential and commercial properties in Berlin and Munich, with a minimum investment of €50,000 and a projected 6 per cent return.

What the German property market offers hasn’t changed in recent years. It’s the same modest, steady prospect as always, a far cry from promises of 20-30 per cent elsewhere, but more attractive than ever in these more sober times.

“The Irish are slowly coming around to that,” says Adrian O’Sullivan of EPI. “We’re not going to get 12-14 per cent returns but more likely a 6 per cent return, plus a growth on the sale price.”

Modesty characterises every link in the property chain in Berlin, starting with developers: where their Irish counterparts were looking for margins of 30 per cent and above, German developers are content with 10-12 per cent.

In Berlin, prices remain modest with the average apartment purchase price last year up to €130,000, from €125,000 in 2007. As prices tumble elsewhere, average prices in Berlin for residential and business units have fallen just 4 per cent year-on-year.

There are two golden rules in Berlin’s property market. The first: bring time as well as money to the table. Growth is steady but slow, and the taxman will penalise anyone trying to flip a property in the first decade after purchase.

The second: location is even more crucial here than anywhere else. The city always had an unusual structure as a collection of villages, but wartime destruction and Cold War division has left the geography even more out of whack. It’s still very much a bipolar city with two areas offering the most robust safety net for investors: the Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg areas of the former East and the south-western neighbourhoods of the former West.

In the last year, city property authorities have recorded a rise of up to 20 per cent to €600 per sq m (€56 per sq ft) for sites in Mitte/Prenzlauer Berg, slowly converging with the average western price of €800 per sq m (€74 per sq ft).

Denis Madden knows Berlin well: he lived here in the 1990s and now commutes between Ireland and the German capital as director of the German Property Centre. He says few Berliners are sorry to see the departure of the investors from Ireland, Denmark and elsewhere. “The agreement here was they were driving up prices and making the market kaputt,” he says, with recent surveys showing sale prices and volumes returning to 2006 after a foreign investor-fuelled spike.

Three projects typify the changing face of Irish property developers in Berlin.

The first is in the trendy neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg, where Declan Morrissey of Fetherd’s MGM Kapital is working on a second development of 39 townhouses after the first 23 were snapped up. Like other serious Irish developers over here, Mr Morrissey is using connections built up over recent years to “go native”: working with, and selling to Germans.

“We felt we were getting into good partnerships with Germans and we always felt the property we bought was solid at a solid price that was a multiplier of the actual rent,” he said. “Since the World Cup, you can see Berlin blossoming,” he says. “There’s more confidence around. This crisis seems to have almost passed them by.”

Further south on Alte Jakobstrasse, a group of Cork developers has already sold eight of 12 apartments before construction is completed on their new residential development.

Perhaps the most ambitious Irish project in Berlin at the moment is “The Garden”, a €125 million residential and commercial project located at the former East-West Berlin checkpoint on Chausseestrasse, near the new headquarters under construction for Germany’s secret service, the BND.

Developer Barry Leddy says that, in a city where over 80 per cent rent, new Berlin confidence combined with an influx of new Berliners, cultural attitudes are changing towards property.

“Their ideas on home ownership are moving more to international norms,” says Mr Leddy, who is working with his brother Glen – they are sons of Irish developer Michael Leddy.

“What we’re seeing is a sustainable growth in areas that were once peripheral in the old order and are now central. It’s a unique opportunity for infill sites that, for historical reasons, were not built on.”

Like fellow Irish developers in Berlin, Leddy is targeting the domestic German market: being able to meet German customers’ demanding standards means he is confident international demand will follow.

Some 20 years after the fall of the Wall, and after two speculative bubbles, prospects for the Berlin property market are steady and positive. Crucially, the city’s property prospects are literally an open book.

After learning their lessons in the past, all information about the development of the local property market is available to the public online. Anyone who does their research, rather than buying on the basis of trust, can be fairly sure of avoiding a pig in a poke.

“In Germany you have good data: every sale, every apartment, every site, every house has to be recorded with the authorities,” says Denis Madden. “In Ireland, with property data, we’re looking in the rear view mirror, with often a huge time lag between the sale and the data.”

Declan Morrissey sees Ireland and Berlin on a economic see-saw: as Ireland falls, Berlin rises.

“When I went to Berlin six years ago it was doom and gloom, now it’s that way in Ireland,” says Declan Morrissey. “But there is a world out there where things are progressing, and life goes on in Berlin.”

Buying in Berlin

Minimum tax breaks on rental income, quick resales, and domestic mortgages

Statutory filing of all sale information into city-run databases with price information and trends open to all

Established rental culture with strong laws to protect both landlord and tenants; apartments that are roomy enough to be homes, encouraging long-term tenancies

No Irish-style uplift in prices for sites with planning permission

Cautious risk-assessment by banks, no 100 per cent mortgages

Tempelhof Airport, Tegel Airport, MediaSpree, Gazometer, Marx-Engels Forum, Gleisdreieck…many plots of land are in the middle of something in Berlin. The Local investigates some of the “deals” and reasons opposing citizens and business (with the city’s government somewhere in between).

Berlin stokes foreign investor land rush

Berlin is a roomy place but investors from Britain and the US have come to see the German capital as fertile ground for a cheap property deal. Ben Knight finds out how much of the city’s  is left for Exberliner magazine.

Tarhilo Sarrazin does not need any help making himself unpopular in Berlin. The city-state’s former finance minister caused a media stink last month by calling Berliners un-intellectual and lazy, and blaming the city’s history of government subsidisation on a collectively careless mentality. But perhaps his entertainingly bigoted remarks are not his worst disservice to Berlin. His time in power was characterised by a zeal for balancing the city’s books, and in pursuit of this he left few sources of revenue unexplored.

Selling land as public policy

For Sarrazin, the city’s real estate was an obvious asset to exploit, and plenty of Berlin politicians noticed his reckless policy. Klaus-Dieter Gröhler, local councillor for Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf, says, “Berlin should not just market plots of land to stop gaps in the budget. That is not sustainable.” Ephraim Gothe, councillor for town development in Mitte, agrees, “Sarrazin usually forced through unconditional sales.” This policy left the city with little control over its own development.

Councillors for individual districts like Gröhler and Gothe are not idealists who champion the freedom of public property. They just found themselves protecting their district interests against Sarrazin’s finance department, eager to sell off land for any supermarket chain that will have it. “I don’t have anything against privatising land in principle, but the state should keep back some of the money – maybe 20 or 25 percent – to buy other land that it might need,” says Gröhler.

But Sarrazin is of course no longer in office, and Gröhler is still cautious about his successor, Ulrich Nussbaum. “He hasn’t been in office long enough; we’ll just have to wait and see,” he says.

The Marx Engels Forum

That Sarrazin’s influence has finally ended can be seen in the case of the Marx-Engels-Forum, the open park to the west of the TV Tower, where a bronze Karl Marx sits with Friedrich Engels at his shoulder, amid reliefs depicting happy life in socialist society. The small park was opened in the mid-eighties, and the ruling party of communist East Germany, the SED, was closely involved in its design. Earlier this year, it was reported that the city wanted to sell this prime piece of central Berlin. According to the papers, Sarrazin thought the sale of the park would be “particularly lucrative” for the city. Like the Palast der Republik, the famous building on the other side of the river that once housed the East German parliament, the Marx-Engels-Forum is emotionally associated with Berlin’s East German past, and like the Palast (whose demolition was completed earlier this year), it appeared doomed.

But the plan to sell the property has now officially been abandoned, for different reasons. Regula Lüscher, construction director of the city Department for Urban Development, maintains that the change of plans was the result of a change of course that marked her appointment. Lüscher decided not to execute plans of her predecessor, the publicly decorated Hans Stimmann, Berlin’s construction director from 1991-1996 and 1999–2006, who is infamous for the Prussian style he imposed on the city (and the Alexa shopping centre!). Stimmann wanted to build a small medieval village on the site, also with a free space – a kind of re-creation of the historical birth of the city of Berlin, which was founded in the area. “I’ve nothing against re-designing it, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to reconstruct medieval structures there. The area will be re-designed from 2012 onwards, but it will remain an open space for the public,” Lüscher says.

Straightforward as this sounds, financial drawbacks probably also played a part in the decision not to develop the Marx-Engels-Forum. It turned out that the land, which was an inner city residential quarter before the war, originally belonged to more than 50 other parties, including Jewish families whose property was confiscated by the Nazi regime. If the land had been sold and turned into a building site, those parties would have had compensation rights, and the project would have cost more than the city could make from it. “This probably had something to do with the fact that the city decided not to sell,” confirmed a spokeswoman for the Liegenschaftsfonds Berlin, the private marketing agency that the city uses to sell its property.

A historical template

But although Berlin has lost its chance to have a fake medieval village, Lüscher does intend to re-develop the entire city centre according to a historical template. The tip of this archaeological iceberg will be the Stadtschloss, a reconstruction of Berlin’s central imperial castle, the residence of Prussian kings and German kaisers, on the site of the Palast der Republik. The guiding principle of Lüscher’s vision for the historical city centre, stretching out south and east from the Stadtschloss to the river, is the idea that history should not be reconstructed, but ‘uncovered’. Archaeological remains are to be dug up and displayed in between modern apartment blocks. “It is meant to be the renaissance of the city centre. It is meant to bring the population of Berlin back into the centre … And at the same time we want to remind people that this was the birthplace of the city.”

All this means extensive privatisation, of course, as well as infrastructural re-development – widening or narrowing roads, and extending public transport services (a tram line is even intended for the area). The Urban Development department organises architect competitions to see what form the development will take. One recently concluded competition is the Luisenblock Ost, where a new office block is being planned near Friedrichstraße.

Berlin’s fiscal constraints mean that the project must be ‘cost-neutral’ – in other words, the state parliament has ordered that the sale of properties in the area has to fund the infrastructural upgrades.

Privatisation of the Spree bank

Extensive privatisation by way of large-scale projects has drawn passionate opposition from the population. The most high-profile of these schemes is the Mediaspree investment project, the colonisation of nearly four kilometres on both sides of the Spree in the east of the city by a horde of media corporations.

Part of the plan has already been realised with the O2-World Arena, which at the moment is still standing in the middle of sprawling wasteland, but will be nestled in a forest of new buildings within the next five years. Two 200-plus-room hotels will be built in the area to host the extra visitors that the immense venues will bring. One, the seven-floor Hotel Spreeport, will take up the area now occupied by the Maria am Ostbahnhof nightclub. The fashion centre Labels II Berlin is a collection of fashion showrooms about to open between the offices of Universal and MTV. Puma, Camel Lifestyle und s.Oliver are among the labels that have rented space in the centre. Despite the global financial crisis, space has also been rented in many of the unfinished office buildings. The entire project is meant to create 30,000 jobs, at least according to urban development minister Ingeborg Junge-Reyer, and as much as €3 billion are being invested. The parts of Mediaspree that have already been built – the offices of Universal, MTV, the Verdi trade union and the O2-World – are estimated to have already created some 15,000 jobs.

Citizens against corporations

A movement calling itself Mediaspree Versenken (‘Sink the Mediaspree’) succeeded in forcing a district referendum last year, the results of which showed that locals were against the plans. But the city, represented by Junge-Reyer, did its best to ignore these results, and went ahead with guaranteeing investors planning permission. The authorities claimed that to sink the project would cost the city €165 million in damages, a figure disputed by Mediaspree Versenken. The referendum only managed to force some alterations to the plans, mainly in order to create public access to the river and adequate open space, which has now been ensured. One building at the Elsen Bridge is still in debate, as is the height and density of certain projected buildings at the Schilling Bridge, but the rest is now apparently beyond revision. Manfred Kühne, project manager at the Department for Urban Development, gave the Tagesspiegel a telling quote earlier this year: “The discussion around the citizens’ initiative has awoken the false impression that projects could be endangered.”

For Mediaspree Versenken, the construction of a row of media buildings along the river would waste the chance to create a social and recreational area, and would be another nail in the coffin of the improvisational element of Berlin culture – represented by Bar 25, the bar, nightclub and performance venue that grew out of a makeshift beach bar on the river bank. Despite its commercial success, Bar 25 has been forced to close to make way for new plans: Berlin’s waste disposal service BSR owns the and would like to sell it for around €31 million. So far, no buyer has been found. For Lüscher, establishments like Bar 25 should be recognised as only a transitory stage in the capital investment of an area.

“These temporary utilisations of space are of course wonderful, but they are also a kind of privatisation. One should be aware of that. I think it’s great that you have these beach bars, and they do enliven the area. They are pioneers of space, if you like – they find spaces in the city and use them – and that is a very important stage in the development of the city, but I think that in the future authorities should take more care to manage these temporary utilisations.” In other words, improvised businesses like Bar 25 should in the future be regulated by a state-appointed land management company, which draws up contracts that say how long a bar or a nightclub will be allowed to last.

These ‘temporary utilisations’ have been the flashpoints of the struggle between the privatisation of Berlin’s real estate and the free, improvisational culture that many believe attracts people to Berlin. For Lüscher, who does not recognise any fundamental difference between these two forms of privatisation, but does accept the importance of encouraging independent businesses to get a chance to develop an area, the best compromise would be the implementation of a system to manage plots of public land after they are sold. The new land management system would take care of drawing up temporary contracts with the businesses of a designed area. This, apparently, is the plan for Berlin’s next great private development project -the Tempelhof airfield.

Exberliner (editor@exberliner.com)

Photo: IlGatto

Mauerpark gentrification? au secours!!! Let’s hope this side of Berlin remains messy and fluid, and not a neat row of pretty boxes! There are already so many houses built in Berlin which only ask for a coat of paint (and yes, new plumbing, the removal of the odd paper-thin post-war dividing wall), why building more?

20 years on, a street recalls the Berlin wall

by William Boston on Sphere

BERLIN (Nov. 6) — Astrid Kaiser still trembles when she remembers being frisked as a child by Red Army guards at the fortified border on Bernauer Strasse, where communist East Germany first began erecting the Berlin Wall on Aug. 13, 1961. “They even searched my doll carriage,” says Kaiser, now 58. “I still feel uneasy walking on the eastern side.”

As Germany celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, this street in its former shadow sums up the mix of pain, hope and nostalgia the wall still inspires. Urban change has erased many of the last vestiges of the Wall, but here a battle still rages between preservationists and real estate developers.

The images from the Bernauer Strasse’s past are both iconic and tragic. It was here that the famous “wall jumper,” an East German border guard, leaped over barbed wire to freedom in the West. When the wall first went up, people suddenly trapped in the East jumped from the windows of Bernauer Strasse apartment blocks into the West — or in some cases to tragic deaths. The East German authorities boarded up the windows and finally demolished a row of houses along the Bernauer Strasse to prevent escapes, including storied tunnels dug under the Wall to freedom. It is estimated that about 165 people were killed trying to overcome the Berlin Wall and escape into the West, eight of those along Bernauer Strasse.

Kaiser was one of the lucky ones. As Russian soldiers were upstairs searching her apartment around the corner from the Bernauer Strasse, she cowered in the basement with her family. The Wall hadn’t yet been built, but fearing that it could be their last chance for freedom, the family sneaked over the border after nightfall, leaving Kaiser’s aunt behind.

“We came here every Sunday to wave to her from the street because she couldn’t cross over to us and we couldn’t go to her,” Kaiser says.

The neighbors who once stared at each other across the Cold War frontier now walk freely back and forth across the old border, which has become almost invisible to those who don’t recall its menacing appearance.

“Berlin is one city now, and we don’t think of it in terms of east and west,” says Niels Kern, a 13-year-old student on a field trip to the Berlin Wall Documentation Center on Bernauer Strasse.

Many visitors — those old enough to remember the Wall and many too young to recall it — are astounded at how swiftly Berliners cleared their streets of the gray concrete fortification. Bernauer Strasse is one of the few places in the city where a substantial section of the Wall still stands in its original place.

“I was amazed at how completely they swept it away,” says Robert Monaghan, a professor at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom, who was leading a class trip to Berlin. “This is really the only place in the city where you can see the real Wall. It’s a dramatic statement.”

Though many people are still obsessed with the Berlin Wall’s past, the future of the land it once occupied is a burning issue, too. Throughout the city, new buildings have gone up on land where the Wall once stood.

Not everywhere, though. After the Wall fell, a wide swath of the former “death strip” — an intentionally open expanse within East Germany’s elaborate border fortifications — was transformed at the Bernauer Strasse into a public park. The aptly named Mauerpark, or Wall Park, has become a thriving mecca for artists, street merchants and New Age disciples. It hosts weekly free concerts and several urban beach bars where guests can sip caipirinhas in the sun while a DJ spins techno and house records.

An expatriate American there runs the outdoor “Bear Pit Karaoke”, which attracts hundreds of people every weekend. And at the flea market — Berlin’s biggest — shoppers can buy a variety of goods such as old East German furniture, bicycle parts, rare LPs, grilled sausages and beer.

But this nearly permanent Volksfest could soon be verboten if local real estate developers have their way. There is a plan to clean up the park, chase out its colorful denizens and build a row of neatly tailored townhouses. Finely manicured lawns would flourish where wild grass now grows on the former death strip.

“It would be hard for me if they close the flea market,” says Sahin Ilhan, a Turkish merchant sitting behind a table full of trinkets. “The other flea markets are too expensive for me to register a booth, and here is where all the tourists come.”

For the countercultural types who are attracted to Berlin by the lingering lure of cheap rent and a vibrant urban vibe, the gentrification of the Mauerpark is emblematic of a larger issue: the death of hipness as Berlin becomes just another European city two decades after the fall of the Wall.

Singing “Ring of Fire” as she strums along on a ukulele, Kim Boekbinder, an American songwriter living in Berlin, worries that the city could even lose its attraction for the globe-trotting bohemians.

“The more they shut down spaces for artists and for people to express themselves freely, the more they destroy the reason why people come here,” she says.

Still, it’s too soon to give up on the vibrancy that has typified Berlin for centuries. After all, even a Wall right through its center wasn’t enough to do it in.

It took some time, to refurbish them, to stitch up proper mini-websites, but eventually here they are. Click on the links on the right…

The 1920s flat has a surface of only 54 square meters – plus a mezzanine! – and is located in a beautiful Altbau. The 1960s flat is cuddly, only 30 square meters but its location is magic!

Both are located in the Bayerisches Viertel in Schöneberg…our ideal neighborhood!

This morning MeinMann and I were looking at the new Ligne Roset showroom in Rome, and all of a sudden I saw something familiar. The pure lines of the “Scandinavian furniture” of our childhood. Palisander and burnished metal legs. In this case it’s Tanis, a desk by Ligne Roset, re-editing the CM 141 desk by Pierre Paulin, presented at the Salon des Arts Ménagers in the 50s.

This makes us even more proud owners of our palisander sideboard, an original one, manufactured by Musterring. What once was popular good design for the masses now becomes quite premium-price and bo-bo.

Long live Berlin second-hand stores!

From the company’s website:

In seguito al primo successo al Salon des Arts ménagers (Fiera degli elettrodomestici e dei casalinghi) di Parigi nel 1953, Pierre Paulin avvia nel 1954 la collaborazione con Thonet-France, disegnando in particolare scrivanie e sedie. Proprio in quel periodo progetta la scrivania ”CM 141”. Ligne Roset rivisita questa scrivania nel 2008, con il nome Tanis. Ne rispetta rigorosamente il design originale, ma arricchisce e aggiorna le finiture ”modeste” tipiche di quell’epoca: il piano di scrittura è realizzato in Corian nero o in stratificato nero satinato, abbinandosi alla base in acciaio laccato, mentre il blocco dei due cassetti è impiallacciato in noce naturale. Scrivania composta da un blocco di due cassetti in pannelli truciolari impiallacciati noce in tinta naturale e da un piano di scrittura in Corian nero o in stratificato nero satinato, finiture abbinate alla base in tubolare e listelli piatti di acciaio laccato nero.

One year ago I kick-started the refurbishing process at our 1920s flat in Schöneberg. In the early spring, while the finishing touches were being added…ooops! we decided to double-up and buy another flat, the Little Cub, a small but cuddly 1960s apartment.

Over the Summer I furnished also the second flat and we spent our holidays in both of them. Ab und zu, we would move from one flat to the other, in order to check our ergonomics intuitions, see if something was missing and make room for friends and family who joined us in beautiful Schöneberg.

We collected lots of enthusiastic feedback.

On our 1920s beauty the most frequent comments were: “Look at this magnificent window!” (you see it now as the Header of this blog). “I loove the touch and feel of the old parquet!”. But also the modern evolution of the flat got the thumbs up, especially the bathroom in gray hues and the surprise mezzanine.

The 1960s Cub flat seduces for its balcony view on to the park and the flood of light, making those 30 square meters airy and open. Its German retro 60s design was enhanced by selecting carefully the furniture. A few pieces, not to crowd the space, but the right ones.

In the meantime, the crisis unfolded. One year ago everybody was scared of banking with a Bad Bank. Markets crashed and the like. There were times we asked ourselves if we had done the right move.

With insight, we realized we bought at the bottom of the market (hopefully!) and our monitoring of Schöneberg real estate prices confirmed a thing or two.

First, good locations and nice properties disappeared from the radar, were scarce on the market and retained their value. Second, more mass-market and common properties were abundant and at cheaper prices. But we didn’t want a property without caractère in the first place, so no regrets. Third, it’s more difficult to get mortgages today.

And now, what’s up?

The ugly ducking is back? at Frankfurt auto show the Trabant nT, an electric version with retro-inspired design has been presented. Check out this NYT article…

One month in Berlin! We tested both flats…they are gorgeous indeed. Finishing touches on flat number 2…more info in the coming days!

In an earlier post I was referring to those difficult years, the 60s. The media give us today a golden vision (very much an American one) but those years were not so sorgenlos…neither in Italy and nor in Berlin.

Our WestBerlin 60s flat had to contain some reference to the Divided City that Berlin began to be in those years. So, DDR design. And possibly the best one.

I found this lamp. The shape is classic, a standing metal part with a white cylinder-shaped textured lampshade. But what a texture! The material used for the cylinder must some sort of Ost-polymer, and as soon as I saw it, it remembered to me the external wall of the KINO INTERNATIONAL on Karl-Marx-Allee. The Eastern Bloc idea of what the sorgenlos 60s had to be…

If I will be lucky, also the next lamp will be, for the materials used, an architectural quote of an OstBerlin landmark. Fingers crossed…

PS

This wall was reproduced on a Berlin compilation of 2003 I quite like, F.U.N., featuring the wunderbar Tiefschwarz & Eric D’Clark “Blow”…