Over the years, so many of our favorite “renovations” have had one approach in common: They let the space lead, often stripping back more than is added. So much harder than slapping on the new.
So this lament, by photographer Laura Muthesius and Nora Eisermann—talking about an apartment in a historic building in Germany before they lovingly redid it—spoke to us. “It was completely over-renovated,” they wrote to us. “All the original details had been replaced over the years, sadly. Wooden doors were replaced by plastic ones, a blue carpet was glued over all the floors, even the layout of the rooms was different to the original ground plan.” A case of more is not always better.
Longtime Remodelista readers might recognize Laura and Nora’s names—or remember them as Our Food Stories. We first featured their collaborations in Kitchen of the Week: Making the Leap from Dark to Light, then again in A Darkly Handsome Frama Kitchen in Berlin, and yet again in A DIY Ikea Country Kitchen for Two Berlin Creatives. (You can see they have a particular penchant for designing singularly stunning kitchens.) And now they’ve done it again, in a historic former bank, with apartments available for “holiday guests, workshops, pop-up dinners, pop-up cafes, and as a location for production companies.”
We asked the duo to catch us up on life since we last featured them in 2018—and how they found the space:
“So much has changed! And what a beautiful, intense, and crazy journey it was,” they wrote. “We started working together as a couple, got married in between, and after 13 years of being together broke up this year. But we are still friends and love working with each other. We created @_designtales_ for fun, when we were renovating our first apartment in the countryside and didn’t want to spam our food- and recipe-loving followers with interior and renovation content all the time.
“We always had this dream of doing our own holiday rental. And Laura’s dad had the dream of buying this building for over 20 years; when he really could make it happen, he bought it three years ago and asked us if we want to make a holiday rental project together here. We were quite sceptic in the beginning, as all the apartments needed a major renovation. But we immediately fell in love with the strong presence of the powerful oak tree in front of the building. It’s just so lovely how from some perspectives the tree is almost taking over the building. The building and the tree feel so interwoven with each other in such a beautiful and unique way. When we did some research, we found out that it was the only tree of three oak trees on the town square that survived a huge fire. That’s why we called the holiday and location rental St. Oak.”
Join us for a look at the studio apartment—another glorious collaboration.
Photography courtesy of Our Food Stories, except where noted.
For more stripped-back spaces in Germany, have a look at:
- A Suite of Guesthouses in the German Countryside by Two Copenhagen Transplants
- Portrait of an Artist: A Photographer’s Soulful Cottage in Rural Germany
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