Breda is built around things that refuse to line up.

The approximately 100-square-metre restaurant occupies a former Thai restaurant on Paul-Lincke-Ufer in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Existing structural walls and service shafts divide the plan around a dense central core, which we turned into a kind of water island containing bathrooms and technical functions. Kitchen, service and bar connect around it, allowing staff to disappear and reappear through routes that make the compact interior feel larger than it is.

Rather than correcting the irregularities of the existing Berlin building, Breda adopts offsetting as a design strategy. Lines shift, surfaces project and recess, materials stop at different positions and floor patterns refuse conventional alignment. The effect is slightly unstable, almost like jazz: relationships establish themselves and then move somewhere unexpected.

Breda is our second restaurant for the clients of Pinci. Their experiences in Italy, particularly Milan, are filtered through the physical and social conditions of Berlin. Saturated glossy orange walls, brown bathrooms, brushed and mirror-polished stainless steel, dark-stained oak, travertine, carpet and terrazzo create a dense but controlled material landscape. Details extend from the guest areas into the kitchen and bar, and even anonymous Berlin street infrastructure becomes a reference for the steel footrails.

What begins as tolerance for an imperfect existing building becomes the architecture itself: deliberate, irregular and never completely predictable.

Architect: ALLEN KAUFMANN Architekten

Photography: ALLEN KAUFMANN Studio, Ksenia Vauchskaia and Anna Fraire