mar plus ask sets industrial-style kitchen at the centre of renovated Berlin apartment

Valencia-based studio mar plus ask has renovated a former supermarket into a minimalist home and office space, set on the ground floor of an 1880’s apartment building in the heart of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. Envisioning quietness and simplicity, mar plus ask converted the former space into a calm oasis, complete with a 60m² garden.

All elements in the home were designed to be built-in wall to wall in order to avoid unneeded distractions. The high ceilings and polished concrete floor spread throughout all the rooms, while a beautifully coloured stucco brings a sense of unity to the overall space. The floor-to-ceiling interior and closet doors are frameless and rendered in the same stucco finish as the walls. While the geometry of the space becomes potent, the dusty surfaces of the stucco soften the aesthetic.

From this base, each room develops into a mood of its own right through a specifically-designed configuration. In the living area, the old small windows were replaced by four, large 3-metre-high oak windows, brightening up the space by opening up to a small, private garden in the courtyard.

At the centre of the common area is the kitchen, orchestrating all the main activities of the house. A 4.4 metre-long concrete island was cast directly on-site with a terrazzo-like texture, and is offset by a long wooden dining table that stands at its side. The Berlin home perfectly merges the functions of the kitchen, dining and meeting spaces into one seamless space by precise use of materiality, colour palette and an overall minimalistic approach. This transcends into the living room area that is marked by a change of height, creating its own territory in an otherwise open-plan layout.