RHO Turns the Top Floor of Berlin's AXIS Building into a Colour-Coded Loft for Design Hotels

After roughly thirty years at a single address, Design Hotels has moved its Berlin headquarters to the top floor of AXIS, a new building rising from a former industrial site near Ostkreuz station. On one side is the water of the Rummelsburger Bucht; on the other is the dense eastern city. Berlin studio RHO was handed a 1,335 m² floor with five-metre ceilings and floor-to-ceiling glazing on every side. That is the kind of shell that can make an office feel either generous or exposed.

What interests us is how RHO resists the open-plan default without falling back on the cellular office. Instead of walls, the floor is organised by objects: a reception desk wrapped around a column, a freestanding meeting room, red and orange storage volumes, curtains, felt screens and perforated metal panels. The result reads less like a corporate fit-out and more like a furnished loft. Here colour, carpet and curvature do the work that partitions normally do.

An Arrival Without a Lobby

The community area doubles as the entrance, and it sets the tone right away. A rust-red lounge sits on matching carpet in front of sheer drapes that follow the curve of the glazing. The colour is so complete that furniture and floor merge into one landscape. Nearby, a brushed steel reception desk wraps a round structural column. It turns an obstruction into the anchor of the welcome sequence.

This zone also holds a raised podium with stepped seating, a modular Ligne Roset Asmara sofa and Kvadrat curtains that can close it down for small events or yoga. It is a space meant to change scale across the day. We think that flexibility is more honest than the usual lobby, which mostly exists to be walked through.

Colour as Wayfinding

RHO treats storage as architecture. Walls of red lockers with keypad locks, framed in brushed steel, line the corridors and define their edges. Orange cabinet volumes hold screens and supplies. Where grey linoleum meets red carpet, the boundary curves, and that line tells you whether you are moving through the floor or settling into it.

The palette is bold, but it is not decoration for its own sake. On a floor with so much glass and so few full-height walls, saturated colour is one of the few tools left for marking territory. Olive boucle chairs against orange panels, and ribbed tube pendants catching low sun, give each corner a recognisable identity without closing it off.

Archive Walls and Long Tables

The work areas are built around long tables on conical bases set against floor-to-ceiling shelving, stocked with books and cardboard archive boxes. For a company that has spent three decades building a brand around hospitality, putting its archive on display is a quiet statement of identity. It is also practical: the shelving acts as both storage and an acoustic backdrop.

Where the floor plate rounds its corners, the tables follow the edge, and patterned carpet beyond marks out desk clusters. The furniture is durable and plain, which fits the brief's stated preference for long-lasting materials over short-lived statements.

Rooms Inside the Loft

Where enclosure is needed, RHO builds it as a freestanding object rather than a slice of wall. An olive green curved wall holds built-in bookshelves and frames a table with tan leather chairs, with the city still visible through the glazing behind. Green columns frame a long table like a doorway without a door.

The curved green meeting pod, with its round ceiling light and wall-mounted screen, is the clearest expression of the idea. It gives you privacy for a call or a presentation while keeping the five-metre volume above it intact. You read the pod as furniture at room scale, not as a room carved out of the plan.

Soft and Semi-Transparent Partitions

None of the zones is fully sealed, and the partitions show how carefully that porosity is managed. Curved perforated metal panels hang from ceiling tracks and slide across openings. They filter views and light rather than blocking them. Grey felt acoustic panels, set in steel frames on cylindrical metal feet, can be moved to shield a meeting table from the kitchen.

This is where the metalwork by Ferrotec GmbH and the joinery by Plan B earn their place. A loft-style office lives or dies on acoustics and adaptability. Movable, well-made screens handle both without committing the plan to permanent walls.

A Kitchen in Stainless Steel

The cafeteria pushes the material language toward the professional kitchen. A stainless steel island with timber stools faces a glazed corner and the rooftop terrace. Open steel shelving holds glasses and plates, and suspended glass tube pendants hang over the work surface. Steel is the right call here: it is easy to clean, it lasts, and it reflects the overcast Berlin daylight back into the room.

Details like an oak stool with a tan leather seat set against a brushed steel corner keep the space from feeling clinical. For a hotel group, the kitchen is a natural social centre. Placing it at the glazed edge with terrace access makes it the most desirable spot on the floor rather than a back-of-house afterthought.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings make the strategy legible. The L-shaped floor wraps around its stair cores, with desk clusters along the glazing, meeting rooms set into the plan and a terrace furnished with hexagonal tables. The axonometric shows solid partitions as isolated black elements, alongside a cylindrical room and shelving walls. Enclosure appears as a set of placed objects rather than a grid of corridors and cells.

Why This Project Matters

Most office fit-outs in glass-wrapped new buildings choose between two failures: an undifferentiated open floor or a maze of glass boxes. RHO offers a third route. Freestanding volumes, colour fields, curtains and movable screens give the floor structure while leaving its height, light and 360° views to the whole team.

There is also a lesson in restraint about permanence. By investing in durable surfaces like steel, oak, felt and linoleum, and keeping most divisions movable, the design lets Design Hotels reconfigure the floor as its work changes. For a company that just left an address it held for thirty years, an office that can adapt in place may be the most sustainable decision of all.

Design Hotels HQ by RHO, Berlin, Germany. Area: 1,335 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Lucy Deverall.

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