If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.
Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (EUR245.33), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.
Glamorous new arrival. Stop. Former telegraph office. Stop. In glorious baroque building. Stop. Now polished boutique stay, Telegraphenamt. Stop. A prestigious parkside location just across the Spree from Museum Island at the heart of Berlin may be the hotel’s attention-grabbing trump card, but it’s the Sixties-spiced interiors, lively all-day restaurant and bar, plus a finessed fitness suite and spa that you’ll want to message home about…
Smith Extra
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A welcome drink each (alcoholic or soft) on arrival
Noon, but flexible, subject to availability and a charge (from €25). Earliest check-in, 3pm.
Prices
Double rooms from £225.19 (€263), including tax at 7 per cent. Please note the hotel charges an additional local city tax of 5% per room per night on check-out.
More details
Rates are room-only, but you can buy breakfast à la carte at the hotel (from €34).
Also
Telegraphenamt has a choice of wheelchair-accessible and barrier-free rooms.
At the hotel
Bakery-café, spa, gym and fitness studios (opening this year). In rooms: smart TV, Marshall Bluetooth speaker, air-conditioning, minibar, free tea and coffee, free bottled water, Réduze bath products.
Our favourite rooms
Rooms at Telegraphenamt are enhanced with the airy proportions of their listed shell and decor that’s a mix of pared back (bare brick walls, pale parquet floors) and glamorous (Sixties lamps, retro headboards, high threadcount linens). Views across Berlin come with rooms where ‘city’ is in the title and are worth seeking out. Maisonettes are split-level beauties with a living area aloft. Graham’s Residence (one of the hotel’s pair of two-storey suites) is top of the house in every sense – its vaulted spot in the eaves with a beautiful oval window framing views of the Television Tower is the conspicuous crown atop the hotel’s listed neo-baroque façade.
Spa
With the hotel doors now open, the next ribbon-cut at Telegraphenamt will be for a sparkling new spa and gym – and if the finessed Sixties-inspired opulence of the hotel’s interiors is anything to go by, it’s sure to be a smartly appointed spot. There’s substance as well as style, too: Technogym equipment, yoga and spinning classes, a 1,500-square-metre space featuring fitness studios and a women’s only area as well as the main gym (private coaching is available on request), plus a steam room and sauna. A spa menu of face and body treatments is yet to be unveiled, but with four treatment rooms at the ready, the pummelling, polishing and pampering available will be no token offering.
Packing tips
Telegraphenamt’s elegantly proportioned listed building puts us in the mood for tailored pieces teamed with silk shirts or a statement blouse and cashmere layers; Mr Smiths may want to bring out the brogues and wool trousers.
Also
Personal training will be on offer at the gym. In the lobby, the organ-like machinery beside the café is a set of pneumatic tube conveyers once used to transport telegrams around the original telegraph office.
Willkommen. There are options for interconnecting rooms and a cot can be provided. Cosy City rooms and Mabel’s Place come with a sofa bed (made up on request) and an extra bed can be added to most Roomy City rooms.
Sustainability efforts
A lot of care has gone into transforming the listed digs of Telegraphenamt and it’s an attentiveness that extends to Earth-friendly and ethical measures in the hotel’s day-to-day practices and relationships. The hotel has gone to the mattresses – and the minibar, the bath products and kitchen ingredients – to ensure its suppliers are local wherever possible. Berlin-based Réduze is an ethical outfit supplying bath products to Telegraphenamt in full-size refillable bottles made from a high percentage of upcycled waste glass. You won’t find single-use plastic in the restaurant either. And there are energy- and water-saving measures in place across the hotel to help reduce its carbon footprint.
The obvious contenders are the semi-circular booths at the centre of the restaurant. And yet there are more intimate choices for Smiths à deux – tables for two beside a green bench hugging a curved brick wall on the right are our tip.
Dress Code
There’s no dress-to-dine code at Root, which is more about cuisine and conviviality than the cut of your threads: whatever you’ve packed for mooching around the German capital can be worn to dinner, too.
Hotel restaurant
Surveying the chequerboard flooring, spherical pendant lights beneath a conservatory roof and abundance of booths, you could be forgiven for thinking Telegraphenamt’s all-day dining spot, Root, something straight out of Paris… The buzz, however, is all Berlin’s own. Japanese, English, vegan and pescatarian options are on offer for breakfast along with a choice of egg dishes; or you could plump for a set Telegraphenamt bundle, comprising sausage and cheese, home-cured salmon, hummus and herb quark alongside a bread basket, croissants, fresh fruit, coffee and juice. Steaks, grilled fish and Thai curries are the mainstays for evening, although a menu of small plates, including tartare, yakitori skewers, glazed tofu, teriyaki shrimp and tempura fermented cabbage allow for tapas-style dining. A dedicated menu of house-prepared sushi (available for lunch or dinner) means you can pick out your favourite maki, nigiri and sashimi or order a set platter.
Hotel bar
Bare-brick walls and exposed ceilingworks create an industrial backdrop for the vast lounge space that is Root Bar with a rectangular island bar at its heart, edged by retro high stools, with lower-set tub chairs and tactile sofas on all sides. There’s a good choice of wines by the glass, including sancerre, premier-cru chablis and organic riesling. Cocktails are arranged by designated hour with martinis suggested to kick off proceedings and a digestif-feel to the cognac- or amaretto-based tipples for after; take a champagne cocktail or strawberry-and-lovage Banksy mocktail up to the mezzanine, where there are decks in situ for guest DJ sets.
Last orders
Breakfast is from 7am–3pm (from 7.30am at weekends) and dinner between 6pm and 11pm. The restaurant is closed for dinner on Sundays.
At the heart of Mitte, Hotel Telegraphenamt is beside Monbijou Park, a stroll across the bridge from Museum Island, with many of the city’s best-known sights in walking distance.
Planes
Berlin Brandenburg airport is a 50-minute drive south of Telegraphenamt (longer at peak times) and you can pick up a taxi from outside one of its three terminals. The hotel can arrange private transfers (in a limo, if the mood takes you) from €190 each way.
Trains
Services from all over Europe call at Berlin's massive Hauptbahnhof station, just a couple of clicks from the hotel. On the S-Bahn, Oranienburgerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse are your nearest stops. The hotel can arrange transfers for an additional fee.
Automobiles
You’re unlikely to need wheels to get around the city when walking, cycling or taking the S- or U-Bahn will suffice. If you are driving, however, there is parking available around the corner at Park One, Oranienburger Strasse.
Worth getting out of bed for
Whatever your inclination, Telegraphenamt’s location has you covered: if rest and peace are your priorities, the grand proportions and serene, green setting of the hotel beside Monbijou Park are your tonic. Those in search of culture will find it a saunter across Monbijou Bridge away on Unesco-protected Museum Island; exploring its five museums is quite a commitment, so choose between antiquities-stuffed Bode-museum, the Greek, Roman and Estruscan treasures on display at impressively colonnaded Altes Museum, or perhaps the palatial galleries of Pergamonmuseum, home to collections of Asian artefacts, Islamic art and more historic loot. Neues Museum was all but destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt in the late 1990s, today it’s a shrine to a broad swathe of anthropological history explored through a 9,000-strong collection of artefacts, among which the millennia-old Nefertiti bust is its most famous. The Greek temple-like Alte Nationalgalerie has a collection of mostly 19th-century art, including an Impressionism section with works by Manet, Monet and Renoir and completes the museum quintet. Telegraphenamt isn’t the only enterprise putting its beautiful baroque block to use: the vast complex, set around a courtyard, is home to a handful of international corporates, with cafés and restaurants due to follow, and the shops, galleries and restaurants of vibrant Hackescher Markt (a series of interconnecting courtyards) only a stroll away.
Local restaurants
Floor-to-ceiling windows brighten a shades-of-grey industrial dining room at restaurant and bierhalle Dieselhaus (from the same team behind the hotel’s restaurant Root and just around the block): Bavarian plates pitched perfectly to soak up flagons of German-brewed pils and weissbier include hearty würst-and-potato affairs, pretzels, knödel dumplings, soups and deliciously cheesy spätzle (a kind of pasta). Across Oranienburger Strasse from the hotel, lantern-lit French doors on the cobbles set the cosy tone for inventive international plates (roasted carrots with labneh and chimichurri, Tajin-spiced red mullet, amba chicken thighs with mashwiya and tahini) served in a dimly-lit, red-wallpapered bistro-dining room at Night Kitchen. Hollywood types may deign to dine at Borchardt for its starred schnitzel, but we’re here for the elegant setting (marble pillars, classical frescoes, linen-topped tables), buzzing atmosphere and polished international plates including calf’s liver, bouillabaisse, blutwurst with champagne cream and steak-frîtes.
Local cafés
There are terrace tables on the cobbles beside the river Spree with views across to the domed Bode Museum at Café Petit Bijou on Monbijoustrasse: superfoods are championed in eat-the-rainbow plates such as avo on toast, fruit-laden granola bowls and open sandwiches; the list of hot drinks including a choice of coffees, teas, sweet lattes and smoothies is pleasingly long and features beer and wine, too.
Local bars
A great vegan option for dining, climate-neutral Kopps takes its ethical ethos to work-of-art cocktails, too, meddling German-distilled spirits with unusual ingredients such as rooibos, Thai basil or pink pepper; we’ll have a tangerine- chartreuse -and bergamot-laced Trainhopper. Dry ice, barrel tankards, hand-written bottle labels and vases stuffed with fresh herbs bring theatre to the mixology at moodily-lit, vintage-mirror-ceilinged Bellboy (also serving Middle Eastern plates for when drinks segue into dinner).
While my heart is currently attached to Amsterdam, where I semi-live alongside a roster of other places (Margate, London and Manchester), Berlin was the first European city to steal my heart during a stint there back in 2015. When the universe lands me an invite to the rather grand Telegraphenamt, I jump for joy to be returning (I was in the midst of a spell there in 2020 but that was scuppered due to youknowwhat), but I also think, ‘Please do not fall head over heels again’. I simply cannot add another place to the series of locations I’m wheeling my suitcase to.
I take the Deutsche Bahn train from Amsterdam to Berlin and on arrival, I almost clap my hands – I’m that overjoyed to be back. I make my way to Telegraphenamt in Mitte. There appears to be quite the buzz about the hotel. The evening before, a Berliner friend was very enthused when I told her I was staying there (she was relieved that the years-long building works had finally ended too).
As European cities go, Berlin is an over-achiever – over-delivering on history, museums and galleries, with a bulging trove of art; its streets are liberally embellished with cafés, starred eateries and hip drinking holes dotted across vibrant neighbourhoods. It’s fitting, then, that Telegraphenamt can rise to such spoiling standards, promising so much more than a base from which to explore the German capital. This listed neo-baroque building, beside Monbijou Park and just across the river from Museum Island, is as storied as its urban setting – a vast block that was once a telegraph office where early telephony was pioneered. You can see the inherited spoils of its past, including pneumatic tube conveyers, mail-sorting pigeonholes and early telephonic equipment on show in the lobby.
And yet, as well as history, there’s seductive modernity. Rooms retain the elegant proportions of the hotel’s comms heyday – its two suites and maisonettes all split-level – but have been transformed with up-to-the-minute comforts and ravishing retro details such as Sixties disc-strung lamps and mid-century sculptural headboards. There’s a contemporary appeal, too, to its buzzing all-day restaurant and bar, where the formality of sittings is eschewed in favour of lazy breakfasts that run into lunch, into dinner, into sushi any time. A mezzanine in the bar has decks at the ready for DJ sets. And a spacious new gym and spa in the offing can only bolster Telegraphenamt’s stellar credentials.
I’m greeted with industrial design in the airy lobby, with golden round hanging lamps and exposed brick walls. My room is a showstopper: a split-level maisonette with earthy brown hues, traditional wooden furnishings and parquet flooring. But it’s the elongated windows with views of the nearby park and Berlin’s most prominent landmark, the TV Tower, that make me gasp.
It’s Pride while I’m in town and so I meet my friend P for a rather raucous night out in Berlin. I’m over the moon when, while still awake at 6.30am, I phone reception and discover that breakfast is served until a night-owl-pleasing 3pm. Here (when we eventually make it down), I am pleased to find some decent plant-based options and enjoy a tapas-style selection of plates.
I try to snooze but there’s more of Berlin to explore and I have plans in the lively Mauerpark – famous for its karaoke performances but also its second-hand market and small-business stalls. It’s packed with tourists, with a few locals thrown in for good measure. After a little browse and a catch up with my friend Cate, an Aussie journalist who has made Berlin her home over the past decade, I walk through Berlin and find somewhere to devour a huge bowl of ramen. I forgot how good the Berlin food scene is, and how much more affordable it is compared to Amsterdam.
The next day before my train back to Amsterdam, I venture out without much of a plan. I stroll through the lovely neighbouring park, and find myself at the charming Hackesche Hofe, an art nouveau courtyard complex, with shops and cafés, and then stumble across some second-hand stores. Then I wind my way back to the hotel, passing through Museum Island, and the River Spree. I can picture a return coming on soon. Damn…
