Haus Cumberland, Heritage apartment building at Kurfürstendamm, Berlin, Germany
Haus Cumberland is a listed building on the Kurfürstendamm between Bleibtreu- and Schlüterstraße in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Its pale stone facade has a rusticated ground floor with round-arched openings and dark green awnings, and a steep dark grey roof with five gabled dormers. The plan measures 60 metres wide and 180 metres deep, with three courtyards.
Architect Robert Leibnitz, known for designing Hotel Adlon, created this building in 1911 as a residential palace and named it after Ernest Augustus of Hanover. During World War I, it served as an office for military procurement before later functioning as a large hotel.
The name Cumberland was chosen for marketing reasons, honouring Ernest Augustus, 3rd Duke of Cumberland. In the late 1920s, film directors Joe May and Fritz Lang ran the Wiener-Spezialitäten-Restaurant Piowati in the former Palmenhaus cinema rooms. From 1936 the Oberfinanzpräsident Berlin-Brandenburg operated here, involved in the expropriation of Jewish citizens.
Haus Cumberland is a private residential and commercial building, not a visitor attraction; its three courtyards and lobby are not open to the public. The facade can be seen from the Kurfürstendamm between Bleibtreu- and Schlüterstraße, opposite the George-Grosz-Platz. The nearest U-Bahn station is Uhlandstraße on line U1, a short walk away.
The building was designed as a boarding palace whose suites were to be rented out with household staff, a business model that failed before opening when the banker Fedor Berg went bankrupt and the furniture was auctioned. In 2004 it briefly became the "Hotel Brecker" for the film The Bourne Supremacy.
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