Cafe Camaleon

One 18-metre counter does everything here: arrival, coffee, lunch and the shoe display. Café Camaleón occupies the whole ground floor of Casa Camper Berlin as a modern Mediterranean all-day cafe folded into a hotel lobby and a retail showcase.

One counter, three functions

The premise was that a lobby, a restaurant and a shop occupy a building at different hours and rarely peak together, so rather than fixed zones they merge into a single adaptable room. The long counter is the shared interface for all three, which makes the guest journey continuous instead of splitting it between a reception desk, a dining room and a till. The kitchen serves modern Mediterranean food across the day, so the same counter carries a morning coffee and an afternoon plate.

A room that changes with where you stand

The name carries the idea twice over. Camaleón is both a room that shifts with the viewer's vantage point and the name of Camper's first shoe, made in 1975. Colour does most of the work: red is associated with the lobby, white with the retail showcase and brown with the restaurant, and rather than sitting in blocks they blend into a room-wide gradient. The brown was taken from German Milchkaffee. A 12-metre openable glass façade connects the room to the street, so the experience starts from outside before you reach the counter.

Where the design came from

MVRDV and GRAS Reynés Arquitectos completed the ground floor in 2021 for Casa Camper Berlin, the second hotel from the Mallorcan shoe brand, in a building that opened in 2009. The reworking let lobby, restaurant and retail run together within one spatial language, and it took a Special Mention in the 2022 A+Awards, in the Hospitality, Bars & Wineries category. What sets Café Camaleón apart from Berlin's other all-day cafes is that fusion: come in through the glass front, orient yourself around the long counter, and let the mixed use shape the visit.