Post by Florian Siebeck

A few years ago, the idea of my home ending up in Architectural Digest would have seemed faintly ridiculous. So, for that matter, would the idea of me living in a hulking Brutalist building from the 1970s. Until then, I had only ever inhabited the full late-19th-century fantasy, meaning high ceilings, enormous windows, decorative plasterwork and rooms seemingly designed for people with inherited furniture. Anything less, I told my partner, simply wouldn’t do. Then we bought an apartment in the Sonnenring, a 1975 megastructure on the edge of Frankfurt. From a distance, the building resembles an ocean liner that has run aground in the city, with apartments cascading down at either end. It has 300 units, a travertine façade, marble staircases, a swimming pool, a sauna and terraces large enough to establish their own microclimates. Ours alone measures 150 square metres, or roughly 1,600 square feet. With the help of our friend, AD100 designer JUSTIN HOWLETT, we stripped away the apartment’s ingrain wallpaper and linoleum, opened up the rather illogical floor plan (which was a maze of tiny rooms) and gave the place a dose of Milanese glamour and Brazilian modernism: mahogany, maize-yellow leather, fern-green curtains, a Togo sofa and far too many objects carried home from our travels. There’s a lamp from Damascus, chairs from Napoli, parasols from California, a cocktail shaker from Rio and plates from North Korea. Almost every piece of cutlery comes from a different airline. We call it Rio de Milano: our slightly improbable, year-round summer home in southern Frankfurt. You can read the full story now in Architectural Digest Germany: https://lnkd.in/eX67GEj7 Production by Thomas Skroch. Photography by Evelyn Dragan. Thanks to Felix Wagner.