Hotel designers talk in a fairly blasé way about ‘theatre’ in interiors. Usually it just means a spot of colour or an unusual feature, a piece of sculpture or commissioned artwork. For Radisson it has taken on a different meaning in their new developments. I featured before their use of a tower of wine as a centre piece of their atrium at the Radisson Stansted. Here in Berlin the feature almost becomes the atrium,and it is so large it totally dominates the interior space. Containing a million litres of water and over 2,500 fish (I made them count them twice) the aquarium tower provides all the rooms facing onto the atrium with an "Ocean View", as the marketing manager likes to say

Theatrical it certainly is, and it attracts tourists to see it from the hotel entrance area enticing passers-by into the bars and restaurants. However, the hotel wins twice because the maintenance of the aquarium is done by the Sea Life centre which sends a hydraulic lift full of tourists up the centre of the tank throughout the day. The theatre is enhanced by the sight early every morning of two divers cleaning the glass of the tank – something that brings children to the balconies of their rooms in excitement, sometimes followed by more visual interest in the form of anxious pyjama clad parents!

There is more to this hotel of course than the daily theatrical treats (the hotel says the fish see more looking into rooms but never tell, their discretion being absolute). The theme of water and the presence of the fish tank are echoed throughout the hotel, but its location in the rapidly being rebuilt heart of Berlin, behind the line of the old Berlin Wall gives it a location that other hoteliers would delight in, and is the visible reward to Rezidor’s bravery in coming into this market before other brands thought to do so (visible a few hundred meters away is their Park Inn, the first of this brand in Europe, its 1,000 rooms also having very high rates of occupancy)