Reduced concrete bar by Hippmann Architects and Projekttriangle

You won't find earthenware jugs and wooden wine crates at the headquarters of online wine retailer Videli in Stuttgart. Instead, Hippmann Architekten together with Projekttriangle designed a reduced concrete bar with a cool event location.

by Judith Jenner, 05/22/2019

A mouse click to branded wine - that's the concept of Videli. The married couple Sabine Harms and Oliver Schmid have been running the online wine store in Stuttgart for ten years, which grew out of a traditional wine wholesaler. But instead of operating exclusively in the vacuum of the World Wide Web, the experienced wine connoisseurs wanted a stationary anchor for their business idea, on the one hand as a headquarters for the logistics and the five employees, and on the other hand for their customers. They can pick up their orders directly at the new company headquarters or taste the wines in the Club Traube.

Concrete monolith at the un-place
Even from the highway, the concrete bar on the former slaughterhouse site in Stuttgart's east catches the eye. Actually an "un-place", located between car dealership, subway tracks, beverage market and gas boiler, the surroundings posed a special challenge for builders, architects and interior designers. Instead of painstaking concealment, the building made of precast concrete elements in sandwich construction relies on openness: Between the open-plan office, the 800-square-meter wine warehouse or the packing zone, isolated vistas open up perspectives on the work of the respective department. If the square windows appear arbitrary in their arrangement from the outside, from the inside they turn out to be framed panoramas of the surrounding landscape.

Furnishings without kitsch
Sabine Harms calls the Club Traube "the room where we meet, think, taste wines, have fun, receive guests, celebrate and host events," she says. For the interior, Hippmann Architekten and the corporate design agency Projekttriangle dispensed entirely with kitsch and consistently continued the minimalist corporate identity in the interior spaces. Furniture made of wood, brass and with discreet covers stands out against the concrete-gray walls. Armchairs, desks on Eiermann frames by Richard Lambert, the kitchen with the large natural stone block as a counter, as well as steel furniture and high tables are the architects' own designs. The artist, graphic designer and photographer Martin Grothmaak, one of the founders of Projekttriangle, created the installations katzen, pisse and the golden lettering club traube.

Thanks to the close and unpretentious cooperation between architects and designers, an extraordinary piece of corporate architecture was created, which thinks the CI of Videli authentically into the office space and thus creates a successful overall concept.