Gorki Apartments

Put simply, it’s the sort of hotel we’ve been wanting to see from Berlin for a while. (It’s a tough business; we know these things take time.) Built in a 19th-century residential building in Mitte, the district that’s still right in the mitte of everything that matters in Berlin, the charmingly oddball Gorki Apartments are just what the doctor ordered: a proper hipster hotel without any of the off-putting try-hardness that sinks many a similar effort.

This doesn’t mean a busy lobby bar or a booked-up concept restaurant. They’re not kidding about the “apartments” bit, though the apartments themselves are spacious enough for a pretty decent party, and the penthouses cross over into special-events territory. Here you don’t need in-house dining and drinking options, thanks to the sheer density of such offerings in the immediate area, starting with Café Gorki Park and Das Sauerkraut, both just downstairs from the hotel.

In a sense it’s the most businesslike of hipster hotels — especially when you think about what a business hotel would mean to the new generation of wired creative workers. If you’re used to working from home, after all, then your hotel room must offer nothing less than all of home’s comforts. And a homey, vintage-inspired visual style certainly doesn’t hurt. It’s the sort of place you could imagine settling down for a while.