IN SEPTEMBER 2018, the fashion designer Maria Koch sent her husband, the magazine editor Joerg Koch, the real estate listing for a two-story, Alpine-style house at the eastern edge of Berlin’s Grunewald forest. From the street, it resembled something out of a Bavarian fairy tale: exposed wooden beams, decorative wrought-iron window grids and a white stucco facade with a gabled roof. Compared to the other houses in the wealthy neighborhood of Schmargendorf — “white palazzos, really tacky stuff,” says Joerg — this one stood out.
But inside, wall-to-wall cream carpeting and silk curtains made it look more like a stage set from a 1980s soap opera. The 7,500-square-foot, four-bedroom home, which was constructed in 1935, had been vacant for over a year following the death of its most recent resident, the 103-year-old matriarch of a furniture-dealing family who’d owned the place since the 1950s. There were dark spots on the wall where Flemish Renaissance paintings once hung, and most of the tiles on the first-floor indoor pool had fallen off. Joerg, 49, who was raised about 300 miles west of Berlin in the city of Wuppertal, recalls the property manager who showed them around saying, “The house has an interesting history. It was built for a German filmmaker. You work in the creative industry — maybe you know her.” He and Maria, 48, who is from Göttingen in central Germany, could think of only one person it might be. After confirming their suspicions — that the first owner was Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the Nazi propaganda films “Triumph of the Will” (1935) and the two-part “Olympia” (1938) — they realized that an infamous photo of her posing next to Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler was taken in the backyard garden during a tea party.
The first-time buyers were torn. On the one hand, after nearly two years of searching, they’d finally come across a house that fit their needs and budget. On the other, the building’s anachronistic charm was a permanent reminder of its unsettling past; had Riefenstahl not lived there, the property, which has been classified as a historical monument, probably would have been destroyed, like so many other old houses in the neighborhood. And while Riefenstahl herself didn’t design it, as Maria is quick to point out, the architects who oversaw the project, Hans Ostler and Ernst Petersen, were given strict orders to make something that reminded their client of the mountains, which she’d loved since childhood.
The couple says that neither of them is especially interested in the work of a director known as much for her cinematic genius as for her stubborn refusal to express remorse. “I never joined the Nazi party,” she says in the documentary “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl” (1993). “Where does my guilt lie?” After the war, though, she was certainly seen as having been a Nazi sympathizer. She sold the house in 1953 for about $7,000 and devoted the latter part of her career to photography; in 2003, she died at age 101 in her home near the Bavarian Alps. “I can’t really detach my feelings [about her] from the work,” says Maria. “We have friends who even collect some of her photographs. I could never.”
But Joerg was interested in how buildings can change over time — not just structurally but ideologically. In 2008, his art and fashion magazine, 032c, which he’d founded in 2000 and named after one of Pantone’s shades of red, published a conversation between the architects Jacques Herzog, Rem Koolhaas and Mark Wigley about the future of Munich’s Haus der Kunst, a contemporary art museum and one of the first major public institutions commissioned by the Nazis. The introduction reads, “[To] restore it and to add things to it are considered unthinkable, impossible, unreasonable — even unethical. … The question then is: Which kind of crime do you want to commit?”
Joerg, who grew up listening to the punk bands Black Flag and Minor Threat and still dresses like a straight-edge hardcore kid, enjoys being provocative. “There’s no innocence in architecture,” he says. “But it’s something else when you actually make the step and say, ‘Yes, I want to buy that property.’”
THE FOLLOWING SPRING, Joerg and Maria left St. Agnes, a decommissioned 1960s Brutalist church in the center of Berlin that they’d rented for seven years, and relocated with their two teenage children to their new home. The conundrum of how to make the place their own was further complicated by the fact that there were legal limits to what could be done because of its protected status. They also began to realize how much the original design suited them. Just by occupying the space, the couple thought, they could provide a kind of alternative to Riefenstahl and her work. “The house is quite a modern proposal,” says Maria, who worked at the fashion brands Marios Schwab and Jil Sander before starting the 032c clothing label, standing in what is now their backyard garden. On a hot summer morning, Marfa, a German shorthaired pointer named after the art town in Texas, is panting in the shade of a towering pine; behind the dog, a new gravel walking path coils around wild grasses, blooming rhododendrons and cone-shaped and tiered topiaries. “Leni was nouveau riche when she built it, and we were nouveau riche when we bought it,” says Joerg, sitting on the patio. “We actually took out a lot of elements and reconstructed how the house appeared in the ’30s.”
From the entrance, the stark foyer — with red sandstone tile floors that they uncovered after tearing up the carpeting — sets the tone for the rest of the residence. The room is empty except for a Giacomettiesque plaster ceiling light by the French design trio Pierre Augustin Rose and a circular glass table with aluminum legs by the English architect and designer Norman Foster. An aluminum baseball bat, propped up next to the front door, is one of the few decorative objects. Although their last apartment was bold — the main area had deep purple carpeting that crept up the walls — and much of the 032c store, on the west side of town, is covered in red vinyl, here, Maria says, “I really [wanted] to live in a latte macchiato. This is super calming for me.”
To the left of the main hall, in the living room, oak-paneled walls and a pair of slightly curved cream sofas, also by Pierre Augustin Rose, offset the severity of the poured concrete floors. Two black leather club chairs by the German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic face a large window overlooking the garden. “We sit here every morning,” says Maria. “I’ll say, ‘How should I do this silhouette?’ Or he’ll say, ‘Could you flip through this article and give me your opinion?’” The company’s ready-to-wear label, which began as a line of T-shirts in 2016, employs about 20 people and was recently added to Paris Fashion Week’s official calendar. “When you’re just reporting on fashion, you’re aware of it,” says Joerg. “But incriminating yourself in it changes the perspective.”
On the west side of the ground floor, past the dining room — where eight cantilever chairs by the Belgian designer Maarten van Severen encircle a wooden table that came with the place — is the 40-foot-long pool with travertine decking, which Joerg uses every day. Instead of an actual lounge chair by the water, there’s a sculpture of one: “Calypso,” a 2019 work by the Berlin-based French Swiss artist Julian Charrière made using an imitation of Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand’s LC4 chaise longue design, with a neoprene cover and an oxygen tank where the cylindrical neck rest would normally be. Through a door, a staircase leads up to a guest apartment — where 032c’s fashion director, Ras Baun Bartram, is currently spending the night — and Joerg’s office and library, which contains thousands of books, including a prominently displayed copy of “Marlene,” a 1992 photographic memoir about the German actress and singer and Third Reich dissident Marlene Dietrich. “In 1920s Berlin, you had two It girls: Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl,” says Joerg. “One person emigrates and fights against the Nazis. The other one realizes that careers can be made in that system and is completely ruthless and goes for it.”
Maria’s office is on the second floor, among the bedrooms. For the first time, she and Joerg have separate work areas, although she says that she also uses hers to watch “The Kardashians.” As the sun beats down, she leans over a balcony to check the time on a clock built into the back wall of the building. Tomorrow, models dressed in her designs — trench coats, dresses and cargo shorts, mostly in black and gray — will turn the gravel path into a runway as part of 032c’s spring 2024 fashion show, titled Nothing New. The German American musician Gavriel, 25, will perform a song about love and redemption in the shadow of a place that once stood for neither. Although he was commissioned to write something new for the occasion, Maria says that the ballad’s title, “Mountains” — everything Riefenstahl wanted the building to evoke — is a coincidence. To the singer, it was just a house.
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