On the Rooms We Lost: Altes Polizeipräsidium, Frankfurt

When buildings were made with beauty and art in mind, every handrail was a piece of craftsmanship, every ceiling its own world. The marble columns have stood here for over a century, holding up the building and everything that happened beneath it.

Moving through long-lost places like this is heartbreaking. They reveal how much we’ve traded away for productivity, for scaling, for pricing. Today when I walk through new buildings, I too often feel absolutely nothing. But here, even broken, even abandoned, my soul recognized something. A world that felt more familiar to me than the contemporary one does.

Last weekend I finally moved through the Altes Polizeipräsidium. The first thrill of seeing inside a place like this turned, almost immediately, into melancholy. A space once full of grandeur, a lifetime of stories, left peeling and tagged and stripped. The lettering above the old Sitzungssaal still held its shape, even as the ceiling around it failed.

It inspired me again, the way these places always do, to keep building rooms that ask more of us than efficiency does. Spaces where people stop performing and start arriving. Where beauty isn’t decoration but the condition for actually being together. This is the work I keep returning to, in my salons and beyond it.

I’ve always detested networking. I’ve always loved relationship building. The difference is the room you build for it.