How to Re-organize & Style your Apartment the Berlin Way

It’s Spring and you know what is one of the favorite rituals for Germans to do in Spring? Bringing everything back in order in the house. We also call it “Frühjahrsputz” meaning Spring Cleaning. Of course in Berlin this means finally bringing all the beer and Club Mate bottles that have piled up in the corner back to the Späti to receive some Pfand, changing out some Automaten photos from some ex lovers with new ones and bringing that stack of vintage clothes that become unfashionable back to the vintage shops.

But if you really want to be a pro about the Frühjahrsputz you also have to consider some re-styling and re-decorating. Because every year is different in Berlin and this should also reflect in your own four walls.

We teamed up with the interior experts of Granit who recently opened their first store in Berlin on Rosenthaler Straße in Mitte to come up with some interior ideas that reflect the spirit of Berlin. Granit hails all the way from Sweden and naturally the Berliners are eating it up as they love everything from Scandinavia. They offer interior products as well as household and office accessories with a very minimal, timeless and iconic design. It’s a total match made in heaven with the style of Berlin that has a quite raw, industrial aesthetic.

We selected some of our favorite Granit products, mixed it up with our own things and created a series of styling suggestions that are super easy to recreate and customize to your own taste. Enjoy your very own Berlin-style apartment make-over!

The Panorama Grid Bar

You think having a house bar is old school? Not in a party town like Berlin. While many people here might have one of these vintage bar sideboards from the flee market how about a vertical one inspired by the cage bar of infamous nightclub Panoramabar? It doesn’t take up too much space, just a spare wall in the kitchen, hallway or living room. We used a big grid storage system – it’s quite flexible as you can add little baskets, hooks and clips to attach your bar-themed objects.

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The Ostalgic Kitchen System

In Berlin you will find many traces of so-called Ostalgia (“East Nostalgia”) meaning the romanticizing of former East Germany. I also grew up in the East and I remember there was much more self-made and minimal things in the household than nowadays. My mom had all her cooking ingredients, spices, herbs and food products in unified vessels. It looked very tidy and clean compared to the mess of labelled packages that I have in my kitchen today. So in memory of this kitchen I refilled all my food products into unified jars, glasses and bottles marking them with a label printer. It looks so perfectly in order now!

To tidy up the kitchen counter like that is really one hell of a satisfaction. To give you a bit of the same feeling we included a little interaction for you below. Just move the divider handle in the image below to the left and to the right to see the before and after. If only cleaning it up in real life would be as easy…

[beforeafter dividerColor=”#ff0000″ beforeLinkText=”Before” afterLinkText=”After”]

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The Temporary Shelf

So many things in Berlin are temporary. The city changes and so does our need for space. The idea of buying an “Anbauwand” (which is how we call those shelf and cabinet systems in the living rooms of our parents) is totally out-dated. Who wants to commit to something as permanent as that these days? Instead you could just stack up some wooden boxes on top of each other to create little temporary shelfs that you can re-organize or re-use which ever way you like later on.

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Do You Need Me? Mini Table

Do you sometimes wonder what to do with all those pretty coffee table books and magazines that you bought on an impulse at the “do you read me?” store? Normally you look at them one time and then never open them ever again. But they are too pretty (and were to expensive) to just throw them away. Let’s give them a new purpose! Take a board with rolls, stack all your oversized books on it and voila: a brand new rollable mini table to place for instance a plant on it.

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The Coffee Shop Schedule

Especially for those coffee lovers in Berlin what could be more cute than organizing your weekly routine by pressing little plastic letters into one of those ripped black menu boards that you know from the neighborhood cafe. It looks good and at the same time it gives your weekly tasks and appointments a hint of permanence which will help you have a more organized life in the otherwise quite chaotic and commitment-shy Berlin.

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The Memory Wall

Walls are pretty much an underrated and underused space in your house and the following idea should change that. We took inspiration from the many Berlin walls that are full of memories with their different street artworks, posters and bruises. I’m sure everyone has a spare wall they could use to collect some snippets of their life. We chose an elastic string with clips that we spanned over a couple of screws in the wall to give it an interesting shape and then attached many photos and pictures to it. The good thing is: whenever we think it’s time to erase the memory we can just replace all the snippets and even give our string another shape.

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The Hanging Concrete Garden

Berlin has an abundance of two things: massive concrete and a lot of green. These concrete planters hanging from macrame harnesses are an homage to these contrasting extremes of the city. And they are also quite practical for the purist and minimalist as they don’t require any shelf or table space.

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We thank Granit for the support on this feature.

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<a href="https://www.iheartberlin.de/author/admin/" target="_self">Frank</a>

Frank

Author

Frank is the founder and editor-in-chief of iHeartBerlin. He takes photos, makes videos, and writes texts mostly about what's going on in Berlin. His vision and interests have shaped iHeartBerlin since its conception back in 2007 - and he hopes to continue bringing you the best of Berlin for many years to come.