Berlin still feels like the last cool city humans can be human before everything moves into the cloud. We took a five-day family trip with a Green Prophet mindset — low-impact, curious, no interest in polished tourist loops.

Generator Hostel is often recommended as a budget option for families in Mitte. We considered it but felt that Mitte is too far from it all, and instead contacted eco-leaning hotels to see who had space. Circus was full. Orania was almost full and offered a family room for 750 Euros, still well beyond budget. Michelberger, noted for its regenerative farm on the outskirts of Berlin, had two loft rooms available for a family of four, 300 Euro, — booked immediately. The location was excellent, the brunch breakfast was an added 24 Euro each (you can choose each day), and if you have time to linger, this farm-to-table option is worth it.

A cafe on the other side of the hotel offers a great place to have a cappuccino and a buttery croissant. Artists, designers and fashion types also pop in off the streets by day, and to hear DJs (and sometimes) live music by night. At Michelberger you are in the center of it all without leaving the hotel. I’ve never felt that way before, except once at a $10 a night hostel in San Jose, Costa Rica. I am too old for bedbugs and 7 people to a cramped dorm room.

Every other night a bean bag room on the 5th floor turns into a movie house called the Forest Theater, upgrading your trip to the feeling of a global nomad without having to travel to Chiang Mai. We peeked in on a film at 8pm and it was packed.

The loft bed setup in Michelberger made the room feel like a treehouse. We took 2 rooms for a family of 4, but 3 could fit comfortably if you are planning on being out of the room by day. Climbing up into the king bed every night felt like a repeat moment of “okay, I can live like this.” Beds and pillows were excellent.

Note on scent: the hotel uses aromatherapy-type smells in the rooms, lobby and common areas. They’re from natural oils and noticeable. If you’re scent-sensitive, just be aware — it’s part of the Michelberger identity.

Breakfast at Michelberger is a meal you actually remember. Sourdough bread, jams, vegetables, cheese, the best apple I ate in my life,  — a lot of it coming from the hotel’s own farm. It reminded us of farm stays in Sweden like Stedsans: real food, not hotel buffet food. Designers we know travel to Berlin and mark this place as THE place to brunch and we get why.

The Michelberger building used to be an East German factory. Now it’s full of laptops, fashion people, and families like us who are tired of standard hotels. You hear multiple languages at every table. The shared spaces are active but not chaotic. It’s rare to walk into a hotel and feel like you are part of something bigger.

Simple but good touches: Dr. Bronner’s soap in the rooms, mesh shelves, big desks, nothing overly designed but everything considered. My husband says that’s the German way.

The location is ideal — right next to Warschauer Straße S-Bahn and U-Bahn. From there you can get anywhere in Berlin or to the airport without thinking. Michelberger is in the quirky Friedrichshain district and it’s a walk or a two-stop tram ride to the Kreuzberg district.

Berlin from Michelberger — Walkable, Raw, and Full of Side Missions

RAW-Gelände is minutes away — graffiti walls, skate ramps, concerts, bars operating out of shipping containers, and informal market days where Berliners unload boots full of old Doc Martens and Adidas. Bargain and bring a hood or umbrella because Berlin weather shifts every hour.

Once a 19th-century train repair yard (the Reichsbahn-Ausbesserungs-Werk), this abandoned industrial strip is now one of the last true subcultural zones left in central Berlin. Since being taken over by artists and outsiders in the late ’90s, it’s evolved into a graffiti-covered hub packed with clubs, bars, an indoor skate park, a climbing gym, and a Sunday flea market. It feels less like a tourist site and more like Berlin holding onto its rough edges on purpose.

Skatehalle inside RAW is a full skatepark indoors with sessions for different skill levels and even wheelchair sessions. Teens will not be bored.

Dog Shit Park nearby (nickname earned) is where you meet people actually living in Berlin, not touring it. We met Collin there — former snowboard film guy — who said, “You look like you want to skate and spray paint. Why did you come here? Too bad not earlier, I could have shown you the alternative Berlin” in a way only Berlin locals can.

Boxhagener Platz (Boxi) is a short walk — calm park on weekdays, full flea market on Saturdays. RAW on Sunday felt more alive and less curated than the Boxhagener Platz, with stuff that can be bought on a Chinese website and sold as trinkets.

We ate mostly vegan and Berlin makes it easy. 1990 Vegan Living — Vietnamese-style vegan bowls, tofu panko sticks — easy crowd-pleaser. About 100 Euros for a family of 4 including alcohol. You can’t make reservations and if you have a chance, choose a table on the right side if you like action and people watching.

Iro Izakaya (vegan tapas and sake) was my husband’s top meal of the entire trip. It’s supposed to be Japanese but tasted like an Asian fusion restaurant. Also about 100 Euros for a family of 4 dinner. The kids still like ramen, so noodles and Asian food was an easy way for us to please all. A ramen bowl was about 15 Euros. I didn’t love the broth and had much better vegan ramen in Japan. You can’t please everyone all of the time.

Museums weren’t a focus, but the Vintage Computer Museum was a hit (Computerspiele Museum) — kids can actually play old Sega and arcade games without time limits. DDR Museum gave the kids a practical picture of East German life — like a kibbutz apartment but with more 70s wallpaper. It was my way to warn them about Communism.

Useful Stops for Teens and People Who Like Real Shops

• Green Fuzz – non-vintage alt clothing store, actually interesting.

• Wollparadies Fadeninsel – right next door, full of hand-dyed wool, very Waldorf-friendly.

• Voo  – scent and ceramic heaven, items look like they were pulled from a flea market but priced like art objects (just look, don’t commit).

• Search and Destroy Skateshop – for kids who actually skate, not just wear skate brands.

• There are vintage shops everywhere but they feel overpriced for someone who shops vintage in small charity shops in Canada. Even Humana, with its outlets around Berlin are very overpriced. Pop in though if you need a sexy dirndl costume for Octoberfest or a pair of Lederhosen.

Train rides in Berlin double as people-watching. Watch out for BVG tourist passes bought through an app. We made an expensive mistake, spending $250 for a 3-day local tram pass for our family. We mistakenly bought the pass that included museums free of charge, and one of the days all the museums were closed. We hadn’t intended on going to any of the museums that were free with that pass. I reached out to customer service and they said the passes are, sadly non-refundable. Try and research the passes and what you need online before your trip, and I suggest buying single ride tickets the first day you are there, to see if it’s worth for you to buy any passes. In some instances taking an Uber on short trips made it more worth our while.

Beyond that unpleasantness, the trains are great and easy to navigate. A little less easy for me than Japan.

Multicultural, relaxed, with vegan döner and kepap stands at almost everywhere outside of them. We tried Indian food one night at in Oranienstraße at Amrit (not far from the station) and it was forgettable, but a Pakistani taxi driver later told us where the “real” places were— filed for next time.

If You’ve Got a Few Days and Don’t Want the Usual

• Use Michelberger as a base and explore everything within a 20-minute walk before you even consider museums. We heard that the Natural History Museum is great for kids –– the aquarium too. But our kids have travelled to so many large cities from Toronto to Bangkok, where these kinds of copy-paste museums seem to be a carbon copy of each other and a place to go when you need to kill time and not get the true vibe of the place.

• Sit at RAW for an hour or a few and just watch. Get to Holstmarket 25. We didn’t make it, but it’s earmarked for our next stay.

• Let teens spend a session or two at Skatehalle while you explore Boxi or grab coffee. Book in advance so you aren’t disappointed. Skatehalle offers a beginner’s session for kids for 20 Euros on Sunday mornings from 9 to 11. My son loved it. They have a number of drop in times throughout the week.

• Mauerpark on Sunday for markets and karaoke

• Look up what’s on at SO36 or About Blank instead of Googling “best nightlife.” We caught a show with the teens at Prachtwerk. Berlin works better without lists.

• We didn’t get to the Liquidrom or Vabali spas this trip. The kids needed our full attention. Next time we will look for events at the Tempelhofer Feld, an old airstrip turned into a giant public park, and maybe a hike to Teufelsberg in Berlin, a man-made hill in the Grunewald Forest that is home to an abandoned Cold War listening station used by the US and its allies.

• Rent a bike and drive around without a plan.

Michelberger, designed by re-use architects: Jonathan Tuckey Design in 2018, is the best home base if you can stretch to it. From there, Berlin unfolds itself without needing much planning. Don’t sweat it by booking trips.

::Michelberger

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The modern architectural world has become so absurd, so self-referential, that we are now finding whimsy in a grotesque pastiche of a mansion hoisted onto a soulless skyscraper—rather than restoring the very real, crumbling mansions that lie abandoned in the European countryside. This is art eating itself, an ouroboros of design where irony and spectacle matter more than substance or authenticity.

Philippe Starck’s latest creation, a fictionalized 19th-century mansion perched atop a nine-story tower, exemplifies this decay of meaning. The hotel in Metz, France clad entirely in metal, is presented as a fantastical tale:

“Manfred Heler has inherited his parents’ beautiful house,” explained Starck. “As an orphan, he finds himself all alone, in this mansion surrounded by a large park. Everything’s going well for him, until he starts to get bored.”

And so, like modern architecture itself, Heler’s boredom spurs him into excess. He does not restore, he does not root himself in the land—he invents. The mansion, a relic of aristocratic Europe, is yanked from the earth and mounted atop a monolithic tower, as if a cruel god had taken a cookie-cutter to the landscape and willed it skyward.

“He climbs and climbs and climbs, until the shaking stops,” Starck describes. “Then there’s silence. Manfred is high above the city. His house has been extruded.”

This surrealist vision is the perfect metaphor for contemporary sustainable architecture, which prides itself on innovation but often leaves genuine preservation behind. Instead of rehabilitating historic estates, we spend millions constructing imitations in unnatural settings, stripping them of their purpose and transforming them into profitable, sterilized attractions. This is not conservation. This is spectacle.

And what lies below, beneath this folly-in-the-sky? A cold, utilitarian tower with 104 spartan suites. “Stripped of any superficiality,” says Starck, as if modern minimalism is the necessary antidote to the whimsy of the mansion above. Concrete, stark white walls, and industrial elements form a dull contrast to the theatrical excess above. If the mansion is a dream of the past, the tower is the nightmare of the present: soulless, efficient, lacking any sense of history or romance.

Meanwhile, real mansions in the European countryside crumble. Their grand halls sit empty, their gardens overgrown, their histories fading into oblivion. Instead of revitalizing these structures—preserving their materials, their craftsmanship, their connection to the land—we fabricate their ghosts and pin them onto the skyline like trophies. This is what modern architecture calls progress.

The perception of numerous abandoned châteaux in France is partly influenced by the visibility of certain iconic ruins. Notable examples include Château de la Mothe-Chandeniers: Located in Les Trois-Moutiers, this 13th-century castle fell into ruin after a fire in 1932. In 2017, a crowdfunding campaign successfully raised funds to purchase and begin preserving the structure.

Château Burrus: Situated in Sainte-Croix-aux-Mines, this neo-baroque château was built in 1900 as the family home of tobacco magnate Maurice Burrus. After changing ownership and periods of abandonment, it was purchased in 2022 by a family committed to its renovation. ​

There are an estimated 3 million abandoned homes in France according to Insee, the French national statistics office.

Perhaps the most fitting element of this entire spectacle is Heler himself, this imagined Renaissance man who, in his boredom, creates without meaning. “An extraordinarily rigorous and inventive man, he doesn’t necessarily succeed in everything he undertakes, but it’s always done with intelligence and poetry, guided by a naive desire to create meticulously at all costs.”

In that, he is the perfect patron saint of modern architecture—meticulous, inventive, and tragically misguided. He builds because he can, not because he should. And in doing so, he becomes the very thing he sought to escape: a prisoner of his own creation, high above the real world, detached from the land and the history beneath him.

This is the art of our time: consuming itself, applauding its own cleverness, while the true beauty of the past lies forgotten.

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My first experience in an economy budget hostel in Tel Aviv was less than savory. A crowded, stinking dorm room for what was something like $20 a night, 20 years ago. A German woman manager who announced reduced rent over a loudspeaker late at night and early in the morning if you wanted to help her clean or do dishes. A mouldy shared kitchen. Thanks, but after one night of that and a room of snoring delinquents and drunk European guys, I packed my well-travelled bag and headed to a more expensive dorm option at what was then the Gordon Inn. Then I discovered Jaffa and the Jaffa Hostel and well, who would go back to Tel Aviv again for the night?

Budget travel has not gone out of fashion, probably never will, and in Israel especially where everything is expensive, and AirBNBs abound, new options are rising for the more chic-minded budget traveller. Tel Aviv gets its first pod hotel, Japanese style, named the Spot Hostel in Tel Aviv. It’s located in the trendy Flea Market District of Jaffa (Jaffa to Tel Aviv is like Brooklyn is to NYC) behind the overrated and over-sugared Abulafia Bakery.

The pod concept was developed in Japan where you can rent extremely small rooms for inexpensive, basic, comfortable accommodations. It’s in line with the tiny home movement, which challenges people to live with less, much less living space, in order to live a life with less hustle and less stuff to manage.

The new 90-room Spot hostel has a number of rooms, including your standard hostel rooms with bunk beds aplenty. But find cozy (I mean tight) two-person rooms, and family rooms that have lofts for parents couches for kids. Or a one-person capsule with just a bed.

Since Tel Aviv is a great city to stay “out” in –– you will that most people live in one or two room apartments –– staying on a tent on a roof in the new Spot Hostel will not be an affront to Tel Aviv sensibilities. You will be out of your room more than 18 hours a day anyway. I’ve even lived on a roof and in a treehouse at one point in my life in Tel Aviv. So get ready for the 30 tents that will be set up as an indoor camping space.

Stay in a tent from $20 to $68 a night, $25 to $35 a night for a dorm room, or up to $145 for a double room. There is a shared kitchen space for those who want to cook and an Israeli breakfast is included in the price of the night.

Best option if you are single and coming to Tel Aviv: find a cute Israeli to cuddle up with.

Thousands of tourists are expected in Tel Aviv in May for the Eurovision Concert to be held on the beach. You can also rent a tent on the sea (link here), and in June thousands more might just stay on for the annual Gay Pride parade.

In May 2019, Tel Aviv will host Eurovision, thanks to Netta Barzilai’s 2018 win of that contest, and the Gay Pride Parade is in June.

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Seven years ago Nicholas Fernandez was an air-conditioning mechanic at the Radisson Blu. Now he is the hotel’s chief engineer and main eco-advocate who is largely responsible for the Blu’s green makeover. Fernandez came into the hotel on his day off to take Strauss on a tour of the various initiatives he has helped to implement.

They started in the lobby. The bespoke waterfall there no longer uses fresh water, which is important given the extent to which Dubai and other Emirates rely on desalination to meet their water needs. Instead, Fernandez devised a system that harvests and recycles water created as a byproduct of the hotel’s air-conditioning units.

Energy-saving initiatives include motion sensors that only activate lights when there is someone around. When they leave, they automatically switch off. In a six-story hotel, this small measure amounts to significant savings. So do the new compact fluorescent and LED light bulbs, which are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

Fernandez has also started growing vegetables on the hotel’s roof – a “thumb nail” garden according to Strauss. So far there are eggplants, green peppers and okra growing despite the extraordinary heat, as well as cilantro.

Although there is a limit to the hotel’s greening, Fernandez has also helped to raise social awareness – an important part of any healthy community. In particular, he started “The Box Appeal,” to collect razors, clothing and other daily essentials for the many migrant workers who live on the city’s fringes.

This was then taken up by the Belgium-based managing company behind Calson Rezidor Hotel Group throughout the region, resulting in collections amounting to $270,000!

Of course, the Radisson is not a great option for budget travelers, but if you are interested in traveling through Dubai and don’t want to rack up an enormous carbon footprint in the process, this hotel seems to be one of the best available options.

All images via Radisson Blu

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