Exhibition and shop fitting in Berlin

Exhibition and retail work runs on a different clock from domestic renovation. The date doesn’t move. The stand opens when the show opens, and the shop trades on the morning it’s advertised to trade. Everything about how the work gets planned follows from that.

It’s also where I came from — fifteen years of shopfitting before the domestic renovation work. That’s where I learned to sequence properly and clean up behind myself, because on a shopfit there’s no option to come back next week.

What’s included

Exhibition stand build and de-rig. Retail fit-out — partitions, counters, display, back-of-house. Gallery installation, including wall builds, hanging systems and lighting. Pop-ups and temporary spaces. Office and studio fit-out. Electrical installation as part of the build. Painting and finishing. Strike, disposal and making the space good afterwards.

I’ll build to your designer’s or architect’s drawings, or work it out with you if there aren’t any.

How the job actually runs

1. Read the venue rules first. Every hall and every landlord has their own — build-up times, what fixings you’re allowed, floor loading, rigging, fire regulations on materials, and what has to come out at the end. That governs what’s buildable before anyone talks about design.
2. Plan backwards from the deadline. Access window, how many people, what gets prefabricated off site, and what order things have to happen in the room itself.
3. Prefabricate wherever I can. Time on site is the scarcest thing you’ve got, so anything that can be built beforehand is.
4. Build. Structure, then services, then surface. Same discipline as a flat, squeezed into days.
5. Electrics built into the job rather than bolted on at the end.
6. Finish. Paint, trims, and the detail that reads close up — in retail and gallery work people stand right next to it.
7. Snag before handover, not after opening.
8. De-rig. Strike, dispose, and leave the space how the venue expects to find it.

Berlin realities

The venues here vary in a way that matters. Purpose-built halls come with detailed regulations and their own contractors, and those rules get enforced. Gewerbehöfe and converted industrial buildings — a lot of Berlin’s most interesting retail and gallery space — come with unpredictable floors, walls of uncertain construction, not much power, and goods access designed for something else entirely. An old courtyard building might have a lift that won’t take a two-metre panel, which changes what you can prefabricate and what has to be built in the room.

Power is the recurring constraint in temporary spaces. The supply available is frequently less than the design assumed, and finding that out on build day is expensive. Worth establishing early.

Access windows are the other one. Retail units in busy locations often only allow deliveries and noisy work at set times, and residential neighbours above a shop bring the same quiet-hours rules as any flat.

How long it takes

Exhibition stands are one to three days of build inside the venue’s access window, with the prefabrication done beforehand. A small retail fit-out is one to three weeks; a bigger one longer, and often phased around trading. Gallery installs are days rather than weeks, but they’re detail-heavy and the tolerance on the finish is high, because people look at it from a foot away under good lighting.

The access window drives the programme far more than the amount of work does.

What moves the price

• The access window. A build that has to happen overnight, or in two days instead of five, needs more people to hit the same date.
• Prefabrication. More off-site work usually means a faster, calmer build on site.
• Venue rules. Fire-rated materials, permitted fixings and compulsory venue contractors all cost.
• Services. Power distribution, lighting complexity, and whether the existing supply is up to it.
• Finish standard. Gallery and premium retail finish takes a lot longer than trade-show finish.
• De-rig and disposal. Real work, and forgotten in budgets more often than not.

Send me the drawings and the venue’s build regulations together. The second one usually tells me more about the job than the first does.