Kaufhaus des Westens, Berlin

Kaufhaus des Westens is the department store you see here, known as KaDeWe. Its offer combines upscale goods with luxury products, and the house was created by Adolf Jandorf. Johann Emil Schaudt designed the building, whose architectural style is classicism.

It opened on 27 March 1907 at Tauentzienstraße by Wittenbergplatz, when this area still belonged to the independent city of Charlottenburg. The scale is striking: KaDeWe has over 60,000 square metres of retail space and more than 380,000 different articles. Its food department has been a special attraction since the late 1920s; after an expansion, it became the second-largest food department in a department store worldwide in 1978.

That makes the culinary offer a major part of the building’s identity, not merely an incidental service. The store has been altered and enlarged repeatedly during its history. During the Second World War, an Allied bomber crashed directly into the building on the night of 28 January 1944, destroying its upper levels and setting the remainder on fire.

The building was reconstructed, and the reopening of its first two floors was celebrated in 1950. Today, the name KaDeWe joins a grand early twentieth-century department store with an unusually strong reputation for luxury shopping and food.