©Estrel Berlin Berlin’s meetings market is about to get a capacity and capability upgrade. Estrel has entered a new era with the construction of the Estrel Tower, set to open its doors end of 2026.
Alongside the construction, Estrel has recently rolled out a new corporate identity across the business. They’re clear it’s not a cosmetic tweak: the CI is meant to express, more explicitly, how the group serves association clients, and what planners can expect in terms of responsiveness, production capability, and the kind of flexibility that reduces friction across the life of a congress. In other words, the “software” is being upgraded while the “hardware” rises.
A different kind of experience
What the tower adds is not only height, but a different kind of experience. Designed by Barkow Leibinger, the 45-storey building tops out at 176 meters and is set to become Germany’s tallest hotel property when it opens. Its upper levels concentrate meeting and hospitality rooms with city-wide views, spaces intended for board-level sessions, partner showcases and content capture, connected by an architectural language that responds to each side’s solar orientation. As Frank Barkow put it during earlier design briefings, the tower’s “shimmering façade” was conceived to be present in the skyline, “a new landmark for Berlin.”
©Estrel Berlin
For planners, the more telling details are inside. The tower layers in around 500 guestrooms and suites, while creating premium event zones at altitude – the Sky Floors on levels 41 and 42 alone account for more than 1,200 sqm of meeting and hospitality space, with a restaurant and bar above them designed for hosted networking with a sense of occasion. The building is physically connected to the original Estrel Hotel and Congress Center via a service tunnel, so the complex can operate as a single organism: freight, food, teams, and delegates moving without the usual seams between venues.
Estrel Tower at a Glance
- Opening scheduled for end of 2026
- Height: 176 metres – Berlin’s tallest building
- 45 floors in total
- 522 hotel rooms
- Event Space: 3,800 m² total, including Sky Floors (41–42), with 1,200 sqm premium meeting & dining space, and Estrel Forum (1,000 sqm with a 500 sqm foyer)
- Sustainability: Aiming for LEED Platinum Certification
- A new multipurpose hall slated for 2028/2029 (up to 10,000 participants)
Sustainability has, from the start, been treated as a design brief rather than an afterthought. The project has targeted **LEED Platinum**, pushing the construction program beyond the familiar checklists into scrutiny of materials, air quality, and daylight modeling. “Only by carefully implementing the 45 criteria in numerous categories can we achieve the highest level of certification,” noted Clemens Planck, the tower’s head of construction, when asked why the team chose this path. The choice of LEED over domestic alternatives is also a signal: Estrel wants a quality mark recognised by an international audience.
A bigger story
While the tower captures attention, there is even a bigger story to tell. Estrel is advancing a multipurpose hall slated for 2028/2029 that would add capacity for up to 10,000 participants – effectively providing a large-format room for high-impact plenaries, general assemblies or concert-scale productions, but still within walking distance of the hotel and congress centre.
When both projects are operating, “Estrel World” is expected to represent roughly 50,000 sqm of event space and 1,647 rooms and suites. For international associations, this speaks to a practical kind of flexibility: the ability to design a week that ramps from hands-on training to exhibition hours to arena-style moments without leaving a unified site.
There is also a shift in the sense of a clearer promise of service: faster answers in the RFP stage; production and AV delivered in-house; and F&B that reads as healthier and more contemporary without losing scale. “Berlin’s sustainability framework provides a useful backdrop here as well (Estrel is recognised as a “High Performer” within the city’s Sustainable Berlin program), and our team is working on expanded waste-management services to align with organiser reporting needs,” says Heike Mahmoud, Chief Operation Officer at Estrel Berlin. The hope is that campus design plus operational consistency will allow planners to prioritise engagement and legacy over vendor juggling.
If Berlin has sometimes struggled to align its creative identity with business-class infrastructure, Estrel’s next chapter aims to close that gap. The façade is done; the interior is coming into focus; the hall is on the horizon. The question now is less about what the campus-like space will look like than what associations will choose to make of it – how they will use the added height, depth, and flexibility to shape programs that feel both ambitious and grounded. On current evidence, that seems to be exactly what “Estrel World” is for.
More information: h.mahmoud@estrel.com / estrel.com / estreltower.com