But with cream, please

No white cubes, please: In an old West Berlin building, Thomas Rook created an eclectic feast for the eyes with great enthusiasm for opulence.

Fabric variety in the Stilwald: Thomas Rook covered the sofa with "Mambo" from Nya Nordiska, the stool with Damast from Dedar. Wolfgang Stahr

Fabric variety in the Stilwald: Thomas Rook covered the sofa with "Mambo" by Nya Nordiska, the stool with damask by Dedar.

Like a biscuit with raspberry cream." When Thomas Rook lets his eyes wander through his apartment, he can't help but think of sweets. "I think it's kind of appetizing." Under the living room window, a baroque sofa glows in cold candy pink, while a few feet away, two chairs wear silk by Dominique Kieffer in sugar-watterosa. Together with the chocolate brown tiled stove and the caramel-colored herringbone parquet, one can't help but admit: Yes, the man is right.

Solar eclipse in the bedroom? The sanded varnish bed (upholstered with "Talcy Velvet" from Clarence House) shines all the more for that.

This is not really surprising, Rook is after all a tried and tested style expert: For six years he completed dry runs at AD - as style editor, "the most beautiful new products came under his eyes every day. Filtering this flood of products can sometimes be quite difficult." Back in 2005, in his first year at AD, he discovered a wallpaper that would stay with him ever since: "Raphael" by Sandberg. "I thought they were fantastic in green at the time." He knew he wanted to do something special with it at some point, but it was a long road to the wall. "In 2009, I started looking for apartments.

Tiles on the floor in the hallway of Via.

The tiles above the handmade cabinets are from Golem.

After two years, I finally found it: a proper hovel, just like I wanted," he says with a laugh. Rook wanted something of his own that he could develop. He began to gut the old building, move doors, scrape off layers of wallpaper, expose the stucco - everything he could, he did himself. He benefited not only from his manual skills and his polste-rer training, but also from his father, who briefly moved his residence from Munich to Berlin for three months and brought his know-how as an electrician and hobby craftsman with him.

Custom-made bookcases in old white - the stylist "didn't want anything here in pure white". The only exception: the Victoria & Albert freestanding tub in the bathroom.

Bird's eye view: the best view is "Paul," a feathered find from the Theresienwiesen flea market in Munich.

Rook didn't have an elaborate master plan in mind, but he did have a kind of credo for the redesign of the 90 square meters: "Many people buy an old apartment and then put a glass box in it or a white cube. It's a bit rough with scuffed walls and an Eames chair. I find that disrespectful. These apartments, especially in Berlin, have a history! Something as charming as a servant's entrance can't just be bricked up - that's just great!"

So Rook looked around at antique building material dealers, for example, and discovered Berlin originals like a skylight from "Haus Cumberland," a former boarding palace on Ku' damm. He didn't really have to look for much else, either, because the interior expert had collected old furniture over the years. "I find a lot at flea markets and on Ebay. But I also have a lot of heirlooms, like the kitchen table or the cuckoo clock that hangs above it." The pink sofa in the living room, for instance, his grandfather had "more or less stolen from a shed for me. My great-uncle had already splurged on it, too!" But grandpa was faster. So the sofa stood in the attic for years, waiting to be used by his grandson. The Viennese baroque chairs in the bedroom, the lacquered bed next to them - all antique finds that Rook gave a second life with a new coat of paint and upholstery.

Sandberg's blue forest of leaves finds its green counterpart in the Schöneberg foliage outside the window.

"I wanted to revive bourgeois baroque here. A slimmed-down version of the Hofburg in Innsbruck, so to speak," explains the set designer. The fact that the result is not dusty, but refreshingly eccentric, has several reasons: For one, there was just "Raphael," that wallpaper that Rook actually had in mind in green. "When I finally wanted to order it two years ago, Sandberg had dropped the shade from the range." Instead, an employee then suggested dark blue to him. "And lo and behold, it's better than I ever imagined. Green would have seemed too slippery in the end." On the other hand, Rook was inspired by his partner to dare more color, for example, when painting the bed.

"Harald and I sat in front of the computer for hours, checking color swatches and looking at samples - it was immense fun." This refers to Harald Erath, set designer and artist from the Black Forest, with whom Rook has also transformed several photo productions for AD into explosive but always elegant experiments in form and color. In their shared apartment hang several portraits of the 28-year-old, whose frames he sometimes cobbled together from broken antiques before spraying them peach-colored. And yet: nothing here is artificial. The apartment is an eclectic bubble that, despite its Baroque opulence, Biedermeier mourning and modern color tones, "as silly as it sounds," grins the stylist, "is pretty cozy."

Neo-Baroque and Sixties! The historicist little chairs bear Gastón y Daniela prints.

How To Grow And Care For Tillandsia Stricta