16. Jul
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A house is built from nothing

In the “Studio Charlottenbogen” you can see what the new Charlottenbogen buildings will look like one day. But finding out exactly how you want your new home to look is not so easy. Jens Rodenbusch, the wish maker, helps you with this. 

First, there is only one large table in the middle of a large, bright room – large, white and empty. But Jens Rodenbusch can create three blocks of houses on this table. The buildings look so real, the roof terrace suddenly appears completely lifelike here, the garden there, and behind it the courtyard with the playground. The only thing Rodenbusch needs is an iPad. 

Welcome to the “Studio Charlottenbogen”, here on the third floor of the stilwerk, right next to the lively Kurfürstendamm in the middle of Berlin. Customers stroll back and forth between the shops, looking at designer furniture, luxury music boxes and art objects. But whoever visits the studio enters a 10,000 square meter property, only a few kilometers away, located directly on the Spree, currently a construction site. In the studio, interested apartment buyers can get an impression of their future home and even plan it specifically on the basis of floor plans. 

Jens Rodenbusch, 44, a tall, slim man, is a wish maker. But you first must know your own wishes. Would you prefer dignified or modern? A large American kitchen or a separate dining room and stove? Garden or roof terrace? Rodenbusch seems calm and friendly. Like someone you can tell everything to. And sometimes the customers do the same. After all, this is about something very personal. How did you live before? How do you want to live in the future? Which dreams and visions play a role? Here, at this empty white table, it is all about the future home, everyone is unique. And Rodenbusch helps you to find out what really matters to you. 

He has been doing that for 25 years. No house, no apartment, no customer he has not seen and experienced. But this project is something special, he says. So special, in fact, that he has switched from another housing construction company to AMAG Bauten GmbH, especially for Charlottenbogen. 

The first thing he always asks the customers is how they want to live. There is already everything behind this question. In need of rest or in the middle of it? Plenty of sun or rather a little cooler? His experience is that older people often already know very specifically what they want but are also less flexible if not everything works. Young people are less concrete but are inspired by many of his ideas.  

“Some of the apartments have already been sold,” reports Rodenbusch. One family has bought two, on the third floor, where the partition walls are to be removed and a huge unit made from them. “We can play with all these ideas here in the workshop and implement them as far as technically possible”.  

And then he projects a virtual version of the finished houses onto the bare table. He does this with an iPad and immediately presses it into your hand so that you can look at the screen and thus at the houses as if they were standing in front of you. When you walk around the table and around the houses, you can see every detail, click on every single apartment. It cannot be more real. In addition, there are large floor plans for each apartment on sheets of paper and miniature furniture that can be placed back and forth on the floor plan.  

Rodenbusch tells the story of an older couple who first visited him in his workshop, then went to the construction site to see the surroundings in real life and then came back to the workshop. In the meantime, they have also bought.  

But why is this project special for him? “There is so much special about the Charlottenbogen. Directly on the Spree, quiet and yet right in the middle of the city, that is something you rarely see anymore. The architecture of the two architectural firms is extraordinary. Each building has its own special charm. I think, whoever gets an apartment here can really count himself lucky.” 

Here you can make an appointment in the studio. Feel free to drop by! 

Jens in conversation
Jens in conversation 
Exclusively in the Charlottenbogen Studio: The Augmented Reality App 
Studio Charlottenbogen at stilwerk Berlin 

My name is Karl, I am a journalist in Berlin and I'm here to write reports about your new neighborhood.