A Welcoming Space
An ornately carved Moroccan door leads through the large Berliner Zimmer —a spacious room connecting the front and back houses—to the bedroom in Kasia Korczak and Payam Sharifi’s apartment in a classic Grunderzeitwohnung (Industrial Era building) in Moabit, an inner city locality of Berlin.
Sharifi says that, when the door is closed, it has a tromp l’oeil effect: guests often don’t realise that it’s a real door. “Because it doesn’t fit in with that environment—there’s this traditional Moroccan door squeezed into a 19th-century house—[they assume that] it’s a sculpture or a wall piece,” he says. “They don’t think it opens up.” But it does, and it has a curious psychological impact. “There’s an ‘Open Sesame’ effect of opening an old wooden door, as opposed to a modern door, which makes the passage into the bedroom more pronounced, separating the private space from the more public realm of the home,” he says.
A NECESSARY TRANSITION
Prior to renovating the apartment, Korczak had already decided to include the door in the plans. As their architect Marc Benjamin Drewes, who worked in collaboration with German design firm Schneider Oelsen, recalls, “The first time we walked into the space, it was already lying on the floor.” He freely admits that he would never have been bold enough to include it in a renovation, but
