11.01.2025

Sand-lime brick wall with a swing: glasses store in Stuttgart-West

Building design

The simple curve of a white sand-lime brick wall is the main protagonist in this Stuttgart optician's store. Photo: Julia Ochs

The simple curve of a white sand-lime brick wall is – alongside the owner and the spectacle frames themselves, of course – the main protagonist in this Stuttgart optical store. The wall has it all. It not only forms the bright background of the inviting store, but also serves as a sound absorber and display system.

Not just the title of a song, but also of a store

The new store is located in the northern part of Stuttgart’s old town, a pleasantly sleepy district that has not yet shown many visible signs of gentrification. Here, Wilhelminian-style sandstone façades mingle with more modern gap-filling buildings from the 1950s to 1980s. The residential and working district is located on a slope, to the west behind the university and the Liederhalle, and is well connected to public transport.

This is where Thomas Hommerberg has set up his optician’s store “Hungry Eyes”. Not least because he lives in the area and knows his way around. Interestingly, his business is a direct result of the pandemic, he says. He had worked as an employed optician for 21 years until he had the idea to set up his own business during the first lockdown. He then made the decision to do so during the second lockdown. He immediately chose the title of his store, which was to accompany him from then on, after the song from the movie “Dirty Dancing”.

Three planning partners, one goal

His plan seems to be working, not least because he had found equally committed allies: interior designer Florian Siegel and architect Severin Küppers. He did not give his two planners many instructions. There were no specific design requirements. It was much more important to him that the rooms reflected his identity and values. When you enter the store and encounter Thomas Hommerberg’s open, warm manner, you know what he means.

His drive and the intuition of the two planners helped the location to become an amazing little project. The striking corner store at a crossroads is familiar to local residents thanks to its four previous tenants, including first a bakery and later an electrical store. Surprisingly, some elements of the interior have been preserved over the decades. For example, the glass doors with their typical black handles or the steel supports from the 1950s, which have since been painted white. Florian Siegel and Severin Küppers took the opportunity to preserve these elements – not even all the shop windows had to be replaced. Today, a few frugal cacti behind the glass even evoke memories of the classic “flower window” from this period.

Curves made from sand-lime bricks

The main protagonist of the store fittings – apart from the owner and the elegant spectacle frames, of course – is the light-colored, curved back wall made of sand-lime bricks. It is made of bricks with visible, conical perforations and curves around the corner. This curve forms the softly shaped counterpart to the angular street corner. The wall appears surprisingly light, as it stands on an exposed concrete base and does not quite reach the ceiling. This makes it look more like a screen.

The visible perforations in the sand-lime bricks have several advantages. On the one hand, it has an acoustically sound-absorbing effect and, on the other, it is ideal for accommodating a specially developed presentation system. A “shelf unit” consists of just two aluminum tubes with a sealing ring as a stopper. The tubes are pushed parallel into two holes, an aluminum sheet is placed on top – and a simple, extremely variable goods carrier system is ready. The sheets are also folded to prevent them from slipping. Thomas Hommerberg uses the small units to arrange lightweight models, thicker frames or sunglasses in attractive groups and distribute them across the sand-lime brick wall. Small mirrors are mounted in the same way.

“Nothing is drilled or screwed into this wall,” explains Severin Küppers. The depth of the sound-absorbing brick made it ideal for walling without the need for an elaborate substructure. “Ultimately, it also contributes to the fact that it is acoustically pleasant despite the largely hard surfaces. And even if the builder decides to sell other products at some point, he can easily install them using the plug-in system. This versatility and longevity are the hallmarks of good shopfitting,” says Küppers.

Between vintage and high-tech

The store fittings consist of a flowing screed floor covering and a white counter with a rounded base under the long table surface. The base is clad in “ribbed glass”, a material familiar from the 1950s. While the store itself radiates a friendly openness and is easy to survey, three steps lead up to a somewhat more private, rear area. Here there are three adjoining rooms with an eye test room, kitchenette and workshop. In the hallway there is an old bread cupboard from the bakery, which serves as practical temporary storage with its sliding doors. Old tiles have even been preserved in the kitchenette. In these adjoining rooms, only the woodchip wallpaper has been removed and the walls and ceiling have been sanded and fitted. In the eye examination room, the stucco on the ceiling has been preserved, but a new parquet floor has been laid. The ribbed glass can also be found in the old door to the eye examination room.

All these partly old, partly new elements, as well as the two polished, gold-colored armchairs from the flea market, create a wonderfully relaxed atmosphere in the narrow store. This is also reflected in the contrast between the vintage furniture and the “high-tech” eye examination equipment and modern spectacle frames.
“Customer contact was the most important part of the whole concept for him,” says Severin Küppers. That’s why the shop windows remain almost unobstructed, the store should radiate openness so that you can see in at any time. And a neighbor, an architect by the way, says that she finds the bright and friendly store an enrichment to the neighborhood, especially at night.

Owner: Thomas Hommerberg
Interior designer: Florian Maximilian Siegel; architect: Severin Küppers
Sound absorbing stone: KS-Original
Location: Corner of Rosenbergerstrasse/Senefelderstrasse, Stuttgart

Also in Stuttgart, 17 architects created the Weissenhof Estate in 1927. Read everything you need to know about the estate here.

15.12.2024

Fairs

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Building design

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15.01.2025

Thomas Kröger builds in Munich: urban repair and trophy view

Building design

Facade

View of the first courtyard. Photo: Philipp Obkircher

Thomas Kröger has built a luxurious apartment building on the banks of the Isar in Munich. However, the architect’s design was less concerned with ostentation than with a sensitive dialog with the historic neighboring buildings.

Thomas Kröger has built a luxurious apartment building on the banks of the Isar in Munich. However, the architect was less concerned with ostentation in his design than with a sensitive dialog with the historic neighboring buildings.

The view from the roof terrace of the new building is impressive. On one side you can see the Isar river, which flows in front of the building, and on the other the famous Munich city skyline with St. Peter’s, the Frauenkirche and the Theatine Church. The duplex penthouse, to which the terrace belongs, would probably be called a “trophy home” in the USA. Incidentally, the apartment has already been sold, as have all but one of the other units in the Erhardtstrasse 10 project. The interior work is currently being completed in line with the new owner’s wishes. In future, he will be able to enjoy the view through the two-storey window wall, over which architect Thomas Kröger has placed a semi-transparent roof made of copper slats. Large wave-shaped openings, which look like dormers from a distance, showcase the view of the Isar.

The copper roofscape is one element with which Kröger fits his house into the riverside row with its late historicist and Art Nouveau façades. Another is the enormous and expansive bay window with which the architect closes off the street façade to one side. In addition, the details of the house show a great deal of decorative pleasure, which it shares with the neighboring buildings. The most striking feature is the painting on the façade, a kind of multicolored serrated band that runs across all the wall surfaces. Kröger is alluding to the sgraffito and wall paintings that were widespread in Munich up until the 1950s, which are apparently currently experiencing a small renaissance – Hild and K also had their recently completed commercial building on Weinstrasse lavishly decorated with paintings(see Baumeister 5/2021).

Naturally, Kröger was required to make the best possible use of the deep and irregularly cut plot. As a result, two further transverse buildings with side wings are now staggered behind the front building. The front of the two inner courtyards is covered by a roof with a huge circular cut-out – an element that is reminiscent of both an oversized opaion and round courtyards, such as those found at the Villa Farnese in Caprarola. This courtyard effectively continues the sequence of rooms that begins in the foyer of the house and then leads down a few steps. According to Kröger himself, the upper-class apartment buildings in Milan from the 1950s with their elegant entrances were the inspiration for this solution.

The stairwells, on the other hand, are small. A lot of black also contributes to making these areas of the building appear somewhat undersized. In the larger apartments in the front building, however, the elevator leads directly to the entrance area, so that the stairwell takes on the role of an escape route rather than an access route. Some of the apartments in the first rear building have complex layouts and are lit by the two courtyards and additional light wells. The floor plans here bear witness to the exploitation pressure that clearly played a role in the planning.

Despite this and the challenging shape of the plot, Thomas Kröger has undoubtedly succeeded in designing a well-designed building that blends harmoniously into the cityscape. It radiates a self-assured and comfortable bourgeoisie that one would wish for elsewhere. The purchase prices of the apartments in the front building, on the other hand, can hardly be described as bourgeois; they cost – or have cost – a mid-single-digit million euro amount, because, as mentioned at the beginning, only one last apartment is still available.

Speaking of expensive housing: architect Jean-Christophe Quinton has achieved the opposite with his Parisian residential building with a sandstone façade, which houses social housing.