Green Marble Floors Brighten This Modernist Family Home in Germany

By Valerie Präkelt

Photography by Evelyn Dragan

The traffic on the streets of Los Angeles was a lot more jammed than usual and Issa Masé did not want to be stuck on the road for hours just to get to a private party on the other side of town. But during the week of the Coachella music festival in spring 2017, fate was on his side and the party was moved to his neighborhood. He attended happily. There, the marketing expert met German influencer Lisa Banholzer who had just taken over the DJ booth after the first DJ had knocked back a few too many. Issa was thrilled by Lisa’s Deutschrap, or German rap, playlist and invited her to join him at a party the next night. They fell in love, started a long-distance relationship between New York and Berlin, and eventually started a family in Germany. And then, with a bit of luck, along with their keen sense of aesthetics and aura, they discovered the perfect home for their young family.

The two cubes in which Lisa and Issa Masé live with their daughters, Zoe and Mila, were built in 1968 with a focus on the practical (there’s lots of built-in cabinet space) as well as the optimism typical of much modernist design. The house fits the period, Lisa thinks; after all, it went up the same year that Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie opened in Berlin.

Valerie Präkelt: For the past two years, you’ve been living with your two daughters in a midcentury house on the outskirts of Frankfurt. Did you ever consider moving to New York?

Lisa: New York is a magical place to date and fall in love. Starting a family in America, however, is something else. After two years of a long-distance relationship between Berlin and New York, I got pregnant, and Issa moved to Germany for our little family.

You lived in Berlin for two years. What drew you from there to Frankfurt?

Issa: Berlin is an insanely vibrant and creative city, but our needs as a family had changed and we wanted to find both a place and a space where we could focus more on ourselves and our next chapter in life. Then, my new job as head of marketing at the world’s largest oral care and technology company gave us the option to move to the Frankfurt area.

Lisa: We were open to a change. We found our new home through a real estate platform. While the pictures in the ad didn’t show much, the marble floors and wood paneling were intriguing. I knew we had to at least take a look!

Issa: And then as we walked through the door for the first time, we thought “Wait, something like this really exists?” The materials, the huge floor plan, the open glass... the aura of the building grabbed us immediately.

Do you know who the architect was who designed the house?

Lisa: All we know is that it was commissioned by an industrialist in 1968 who definitely had a sense of the aesthetics of his time. He had the courage to put down green marble. Every day here the house shows how it was meant to bring people together.

The DJ stand in the office is custom made by Milan studio NM3, with Dimensions Unknown by Seth Damm hanging above it.

In Berlin, Lisa and Issa lived in an apartment with one-and-a-half rooms and sometimes even had to make an office out of the bathroom. They enjoy plenty of space now thanks in part to built-in cabinets. The matching desk with Iittala lamp is a vintage find.

How did you go about furnishing it?

Lisa: The nice thing about objects that have a past is that they bring so much with them. It was important for me to respect and draw out what this house already had to reveal. In the living room, the light-orangish teak cabinets and drawers work well with the sea-green marble and blue-gray slate wall. I love this play of warm and cold. My ocher corduroy couch that we brought from Berlin fits perfectly with the existing color palette. I tried to create a feeling of warmth and security through textured materials, especially bouclé and linen. I am definitely a material junkie. In fact, the house was last used as a consulate, and the bedrooms and children’s rooms had been offices. And so I wanted to introduce a little more coziness upstairs by using earthy and red-toned colors on the wall to break up the austere atmosphere.

Issa: I have to give my wife credit for the interiors. It was a really great experience for me to watch her find the right space in which to express her creativity and to support her in setting up our home. We complement each other very well that way. When it comes to furniture, Lisa knows exactly what she wants. My focus was on our art collection. It means a lot to me to live with works by artists who I’ve known for a good part of my life.

For the last decade, I’ve worked with a lot of contemporary artists from New York, LA, and Chicago and managed them somewhat too. The large rope artwork in the living room is by Seth Damm from New Orleans. We planned it together for over a year and designed it especially for this room. On the dresser is a work that queer artist Erika Weitz made for us. She took a couple of old pieces of wood from two Indian temples and made them into a sculpture. The work’s called Love Birds.

Lisa: We are the “love birds”! We also have three works by the Berlin-based painter Ál Varo.

When styling the house, Lisa collaborated with Berlin gallery owner Nella Beljan. Having a network of creative women in Frankfurt is important to her: “Viola Beuscher was one of the first people to give me a hand here,” Lisa says. The ceramist's inviting tableware is on display on the kitchen island.

By Sydney Wasserman

By Valentina Raggi

By Audrey Lee

Issa: Ál Varo Tavares Guilherme is an Angolan refugee who fled to Portugal during his country’s civil war. He personally brought each of his works to us. One time at midnight I met him at Frankfurt’s main train station just so he could personally hand them to me. And then he went back to his studio in Berlin. We’re both African immigrants and have a lot in common and a friendship developed.

You have two small daughters. How has your idea of home changed since you became parents?

Lisa: The garden is wonderful for the kids. Our daughter Mila collects rocks all the time that I use as paperweights and bookmarks. Our stone floor is great for riding a scooter. Mila takes hers, puts on a helmet, and goes around in circles. The dresser is full of toys that make their way back there at the end of each day.

Issa: I’m excited to see, as they get older, what our daughters’ perception will be of what we’ve done with our house, how we’ve furnished it, and what kind of art we’ve put up.

Lisa: I wonder sometimes if our children need more hobbies. But then, Issa will say “But we have everything here, and we’re interested in music!” We DJ here, and there’s always a ukulele lying around. That’s how our children experience music, without us tricking them into anything. The same goes for art.

Issa: Everything we do is with purpose. Together we make a great team...

Lisa: …and the house is our playground.

All the interiors were painted in colors by Caparol Icons, but in the bathroom a ’70s color palette still reigns.

A classic Danish Semi Pendant lamp (Gubi) hangs above the dining room teak table.

By Sydney Wasserman

By Valentina Raggi

By Audrey Lee

A Gubi Timberline lamp is angled over two bouclé chairs from Westwing that contrast with in the cool living marble floor.

A painting by Julie Haverkamp hangs above the staircase.

It may be hard to believe looking at it today, but the principal bedroom used to be an office.

This story was first published by AD Germany. It was produced by Thomas Skroch and translated by John Oseid.