Dresden-based studio WERCK Workshop modelled the renovation of a 75-square-metre (807-square-foot) Berlin apartment on a building nearly 10,000 kilometres (6,214 miles) away: Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s apartments in the Edifício Jaraguá in São Paulo. Set inside a 22-storey residential tower completed in 1976, the apartment borrows its ceiling fan, plant-cooled air, and light-toned palette from that reference, described in the studio’s own project text as “an oasis above the city.” The result reads less like a conventional German renovation and more like a specific, imported way of living, set down inside a communist-era high-rise.
A vanished three-room layout gave the project its starting point. The original plan — an internal corridor, a windowless kitchen, an enclosed bathroom — was stripped away entirely as part of this Berlin apartment renovation, reducing the flat to its bare structural concrete frame before any new element was introduced.
A central servicing core now organizes what remains. Consolidating the kitchen, washing machine, and bathroom radiator into a single volume, the core is described by the studio as becoming “a piece of furniture in its own right,” structuring the apartment as a continuous loop that can be flexibly subdivided using three sliding doors — a sliding door apartment layout in the same spirit as the joinery-driven reconfiguration behind Georgios Apostolopoulos’s Kifisia apartment, where walls fold away rather than stay fixed.
A tiled bench in the living area mirrors the exposed concrete beam running overhead, a concrete structural frame renovation detail that turns a leftover structural element into part of the room’s seating.
Floor-to-ceiling window openings replace what had been a partial facade, extending the glazing down to floor level along the full length of the apartment in this floor-to-ceiling window apartment design and opening an uninterrupted view across the Berlin skyline.
A São Paulo tile reference shapes the interior’s colour logic. The ceramic tiles draw on the residential buildings of Higienópolis, reinterpreted here through a differentiated palette that gives each room in the ceramic tile interior design scheme its own distinct mood.
Rotated built-in cabinets from the apartment’s original construction were kept rather than replaced, turned 90 degrees and repositioned parallel to the interior wall; a curtain lets their contents be revealed or hidden depending on use. Their existing wood tone set the direction for the rest of the material palette — all new timber was executed in oiled American cherry interior work, the same restraint that shaped Bruzkus Greenberg’s near-identical 75-square-metre Blue Box apartment elsewhere in Berlin.
A renovation cost of 1,060 euros per square metre, facade included, covered the full scope: aluminium, linoleum, American cherry, and fine stone, built by joinery contractor Eder Berlin, with WERCK Workshop leading design through construction in cooperation with Hauptstadt-Studio.Berlin’s Lukas Beer on the later project phases. The project makes a broader case for this East German housing stock renovation approach: beneath later layers of adaptation, robust structural systems and generous proportions turn out to still be there, waiting on a few precise interventions rather than a full rebuild.
The cabinets that never left stay with you longer than the skyline view running the length of the apartment — turned a quarter-turn, given a curtain, and left to decide for themselves how much of the past should stay on display.
OASIS by WERCK Workshop | Location: Berlin, Germany — Year: 2026 — Key materials: aluminium, linoleum, American cherry, fine stone