Our New Hallways

We’ve just completed a renovation of our hallways.

The most important part of that was the design and installation of a new lighting system to replace the old wall-mounted light boxes. We wanted to go for some variations on the classic glass globe lamp and the only way to do it how we wanted was to find a glass blower and have them made to our specifications. Our research leads us to the wonderful Nadania and Jesse from Berlin Glas, a non-profit glass-blowing studio in Wedding that gives artists the chance to work with hot glass and gives classes to the public and kids from the local community. It also does some commercial work to subsidise those activities.

So over the course of a few days, they blew our lamps… all 105 of them! And then, very very carefully, we got them back to the hotel.

A beautiful lamp needs a beautiful bulb to go in it. And that proved to be a huge challenge. We wanted a dimmable bulb which gave off a soft, warm glow and had a nice filament. But of course, it had to be LED! It seemed like mission impossible, and we searched and searched with no luck. Right at the very last minute we came across a company called Segula (thank you Frau Sahm!) that had just launched the very thing we were looking for and feared didn’t exist: a dimmable LED bulb which looked and glowed like an old-style incandescent filament one… and when we plugged it in, we really couldn’t tell that it’s an LED.

We hung them all, repainted them, and now we’re done. Here are some impressions: you want to see how it all looks… well, you just gotta come by and see it for yourself!