Behind a gate on Kantstrasse that most people walk past, two buildings that used to try women and then hold them. Grüntuch Ernst finished the conversion in 2022. The rooms were cells, and the house neither hides that nor sells it.
The gate on Kantstrasse
Kantstrasse 79, in Charlottenburg, behind a gate most people walk past. That is the first fact about Wilmina and it is not an accident of siting. The buildings were never meant to be looked at from the street. A courthouse and, behind it, a women's prison, arranged so that the city did not have to see the second one. The hotel has kept that arrangement rather than opening it up, and the result is that you go through a gate and the noise stops.
Transformed, expanded and reprogrammed
Grüntuch Ernst Architekten give their own three words for what they did: transformed, expanded and reprogrammed. The work was completed in 2022. The courthouse came back as a space for art and culture. The prison is the hotel. Between the two they put a new building, which holds the restaurant, and around them gardens and courtyards that did not exist when the walls were doing their original job. Reprogrammed is the honest word of the three. The buildings were not restored to anything, because there is nothing here anybody would want to restore.
The rooms were cells
This is the part every write up reaches for and most of them get wrong by reaching too hard. The rooms were cells. The house neither hides that nor sells it, and that restraint is the only reason the place works at all. There is no theming, no wry signage, no invitation to find it delicious. What you get instead is proportion: small, tall, top lit rooms with the geometry the original use imposed, in a building that is now quiet for entirely different reasons. A hotel that made a feature of this would be unbearable within an hour. This one does not, so you stop thinking about it by the second morning.
Lovis, and the practical half
The restaurant is Lovis, in the new building that joins the courthouse to the prison, published as serving Tuesday to Saturday from half past six in the evening. That is what their pages say and it is what we have printed. We did not reach the house by telephone, and it publishes no summer closure, which is not the same as being open through August. If you are travelling for the table rather than the room, confirm it before you book the flight. The room count, the number of levels and the date the prison stopped being a prison all appear in architectural coverage; none of it is on the house's own pages, so none of it is here.
At a glance
The TGC view
Berlin has a great deal of history and almost no idea what tone to take about it. Wilmina is the one building we know of in the city that has found the right one, which is to say none at all. We book it for a guest who wants Charlottenburg, a quiet room and a building with something behind it, and who would rather not be told a story at breakfast.
Want us to arrange it?
We hold the relationships, the rooms and the access. Tell us the dates and we handle the rest.
Visit website ↗The newest building in this issue by more than a century, standing on the shore of the Alster inside the city. It is also the house that publishes least about itself, and we have written it accordingly.
Read the review →A walled garden at the foot of Hidari Daimonji, half an hour north of Kyoto Station, with twenty six rooms in it and sixteen UNESCO sites within reach. The point of the house is that it is not among them.
Read the review →A family that arrived in Kyoto from Fukui in the transport and seafood trade, and only became innkeepers a generation later. Kawabata wrote here. The building is a registered cultural property. There is no view and nothing to prove.
Read the review →