HIDDEN PLACES - ORCO Germany

Romann Fehrentz is a very busy man. Apart from an exceptionally
good dental practice, he actually runs the Braun-
Fehrentz interior studio that doesn‘t only specialise in bathrooms.
And as if that were not enough to do in a day, he
recently opened a Japanese style soup restaurant, the artistically designed Susuru. What
drives this man and what links him to Berlin? We met Romann on a very hot, sunny day,
to get to the bottom of these questions.
INTERVIEW Stephan Burkoff PORTRAIT Christian Brox FOTO Ludger Paffrath
Is there something that links the things that you do?
What motivates me and what I really enjoy doing is creat-
ing situations so that they work and can be used perfectly.
It doesn‘t matter whether it‘s my dental practice, a build-
ing to be constructed or a restaurant. At the beginning of
projects I always ask myself the same question: What do
the customers really need? How do others do it and what
do I want to do better?
Why have you just opened a restaurant for Japanese
food?
I‘ve always been fascinated by the idea of a coffee shop.
A high table, at which many people sit next to each other.
Where people who don‘t know each other at all can talk to
each other but don‘t have to and where you can easily get
a quick drink and have a snack. And with the incidentally
very healthy, fresh Japanese food that we offer, we have
found a very simple, quick, varied, easily-digestible cuisine
for this basic idea that is in keeping with the times. Freshly
prepared soups with noodles – that‘s our idea of fast food.
But obviously the restaurant should also express my inter-
est in perfection and my aesthetic demands, i.e. our ability
as fitters.
Do you think that a multi-faceted life such as yours
would be possible in any city other than Berlin?
It would be difficult. Unlike other cities there is still scope here
for new ideas and above all there are also places to build to
bring these ideas to fruition. In both cases, with the interior
studio and with the restaurant, there were hardly any direct
competitors here in Mitte. This is a unique situation in itself.
MuLTITAsK KInG
But not the only reason for choosing this location?
No. We also had to ask ourselves where our customers were living. Where do people
with very great interest in creative, high-quality bathrooms live who also have the
financial means to buy these particular tasteful items? Who uses the sort of things
that we make with Susuru and BraunFehrentz and where are the creative people and
implementers that we need as disseminators for our projects? Well, these people now
live and work in Mitte.
Is there anything you haven‘t got here?
A really good baker. Anything you can get from high street chains is not worth
talking about both in terms of shop design and also the product. People don‘t re-
ally want to go into them but there‘s really no other option. That could be my next
project. But before, if everything falls into place, I am going to open another bath-
room studio this year, a shop just dealing in goods from one Italian manufacturer, in
the historic WMF building on Leipziger Strasse.
What do you tell your international customers about Berlin?
I, personally, travel a lot. And I find that Berlin is actually the leading city in Europe
and has the most opportunities for the future. Berlin has such a terrifically creative
potential. You can see it seething inMitte and new buildings are going up all the
time. Today, there may still be something of Berlin in some places. But Rosenthaler
Strasse has shown what it is going to be like. Where once there were only small
shops selling trashy goods, international brands with their high-quality flagship
stores have now become established there. I think that this will be a pattern for
Berlin and above all for Mitte.