Studio Aisslinger redesigns Bikini Hotel Berlin for its eleventh anniversary
Situated in the Berlin Zoo area, heart of City West, travellers and design lovers can find the 25hours Hotel Bikini, a hotel completely redesigned by Studio Aisslinger, the practice behind the original 2014 concept. What strikes you first is the position. The rooms open onto full-height windows with a view unlike anything else in the city, Tiergarten on one side, the skyline on the other, the sound of the animals reaching up from below from the moment you wake.
It’s the setting Aisslinger was asked to work with again for a renovation completed this July, in time for the hotel‘s eleventh birthday, a return rather than a reinvention, the same team keeping a building that never lost its cult status feeling exactly as unpredictable as it did on day one.
The first sense of that shift comes on the third floor, where the lobby has quietly relocated. Gone is the idea of a single reception desk as the heart of the building; in its place, a sprawling open floor split into loose zones for sitting, working, reading, its shared bathroom built around a single industrial steel fountain that does the job of a dozen separate sinks.
Francesca Schiano, General Manager of the hotel since 2020, calls this new area her favourite spot in the building. During the day, it’s an open, shared space where guests can relax, read, work or grab a snack from the Nomad Day Bar. In the evening, it turns into an alternative to the Monkey Bar on the tenth floor, which we’ll come back to later, offering a cosier setting built around sofas, hammocks and lighting designed to shift the whole mood of the room.
Upstairs, in one of the Medium Jungle rooms, the same logic plays out differently. The floor-to-ceiling windows look straight onto the zoo and the Tiergarten beyond it, and a hammock hangs across the corner by the glass, the room’s answer to a balcony it doesn’t have, close enough to hear the animals from the moment you wake. Lighting does a lot of the work here too: pendant lamps in a burnt terracotta tone hang low over the bed and the sink, giving the room a mix of the sophisticated and the raw that runs through the whole hotel.
The bathroom keeps the same open plan as elsewhere in the building, a green-tiled block with the sink built into it doubling as a divider between the sleeping area and the bathing area, a mirror set against the same warm light. The shower pushes the same idea one step further, an opening rather than a door, full-height glass and the same view over the zoo, close enough that privacy is handled by height and greenery rather than walls.
The rest of the rooms follow the same instinct in different keys. In the Large Urban and Large Jungle rooms, the bed has been pulled away from the wall entirely and turned to face forward, so it looks straight out over the park or the skyline, with a built-in wooden reading capsule tucked into the corner for guests who want to disappear into a book rather than a screen.
The Medium Urban and Urban Twin rooms lean more graphic, sharper lines, brighter tiling, the same warm pendant lighting carried through. Even the bathrooms carry a quiet story of their own, the disused shower trays and tubs from the old rooms were not thrown out but recovered, reworked and reinstalled, a first of its kind project with Kaldewei that fits the hotel’s habit of holding onto what already works rather than replacing it outright.
A few floors higher still, and you land at the Monkey Bar, the place that turned this hotel into a Berlin institution in the first place. Even now, eleven years after it opened, there are still queues on the street most evenings to get in, alongside NENI, the restaurant that shares the same floor. The view genuinely runs the full 360 degrees.
From the terrace, you can sit with a drink as the sun sets and warms the whole scene, while the other side of the room looks straight down over the park and the zoo. Inside, a kind of tiered seating built like small steps and platforms means the view stays part of the experience even when the Berlin weather has other plans. It’s less about the drinks list than the setting itself, a panorama that makes the one promised on the ground floor feel almost like a warm-up.
In the end, the 25hours Hotel Bikini Berlin feels like a place built for people who like to enjoy their time together, whether that means losing an afternoon in a hammock with a book, drinking a cocktail while admiring the Berlin views—amplifying a vibrant urban design scene where Forward Festival Berlin 2026 invites creatives to move from ideas to action—or simply taking in the details of a room that any design lover would appreciate.
