Katharina Raue has been a microbiologist, a food journalist, a set designer, and a restaurant interior designer. The thread connecting all of it? An insistence on being exactly herself — everywhere.
Katharina Raue has never had a single style. She has something rarer: a personality so consistent that people recognise her work before they know it's hers. "My husband calls it individual," she says. "I'd say eclectic. You can't really name it — but you always know when it's me."
She moves between worlds that most people keep firmly separated: interior design, fashion, food, television, brand consulting. She designs restaurant interiors and tablescape reels for Instagram. She does set design for food shoots and brand identity work for clients across industries. She builds brands and, in the same week, searches through 2,500 fonts because the right one hasn't appeared yet. "I genuinely love finding new fonts," she says. "A piece of text, just in how it looks — you can say so much."
Getting Here the Long Way
Katharina grew up in Graz, spent time in Upper Austria, then London, then back to Graz, and eventually Berlin. The path was winding by design — or at least by temperament. She finished school a year early, at sixteen, and used a connection through a neighbour to apply for a fine art and design programme in London. She got in. At seventeen, she moved.
© Katharina Raue
She loved studying. She was also, by her own admission, not quite ready to work with clients. "When someone said they'd prefer it in red or green or blue, my answer was simply: but then it'll be ugly." She pauses, laughs. "I realised I perhaps didn't yet have the diplomatic skills required."
Molecular microbiology came next — she completed two years, found the content genuinely fascinating, found the people genuinely not. "Once you wore nice shoes and did your hair, everyone looked at you like something was wrong." German literature followed, a master's degree, and then — through a friend of a friend in the same seminar — an introduction to the editor-in-chief of Rolling Pin, a B2B magazine for the gastronomy world.
She joined just as the financial crisis hit. The team shrank from seven people to two almost overnight: Katharina and the editor-in-chief. They produced the magazine every three weeks, ran all events, managed a second quarterly publication. "It was the best school imaginable," she says. "You simply had to do everything." Within two years, she was editor-in-chief. She held the role for a decade.
Berlin, and What Came Next
The move to interior design happened gradually, and then all at once. In 2017, she relocated from Graz to Berlin to finally share a home with her husband, Michelin starred chef Tim Raue — they'd been married but effectively living apart. Remote work wasn't yet a given, and she couldn't take her editorial career with her. "I slid into freelancing," she says. "Though if someone offered me a permanent position now, I wouldn't take it either. The way I travel, the way I work — it just doesn't fit."
© Nils Hasenau Rolling Pin
Interior design had always been there, quietly. She began making small changes in her husband's restaurant — always in dialogue with the team, always working within what the concept required. A friend's child's bedroom. Then the bathrooms at the Tim Raue restaurant. Then a television programme, Raue der Restaurantretter where she redesigned restaurant spaces with four weeks' notice and a budget of around five thousand euros per space. "You think more carefully about what matters when the budget is tight," she says. "For a Michellin starred restaurant, I invested almost everything in lighting — had thirteen new outlets drilled. The chairs, I was sure, wouldn't last more than a year. But the atmosphere will."
Today she runs Studio Raue — her own design brand, under which she enters award submissions — and Raue Consulting, which she runs jointly with her husband Tim and which brings their shared projects together. She is currently working on a restaurant rebrand in Berlin, table settings, merchandise with artists from LA, and an architecture prize submission for a restaurant she completed last year.
What Good Design Actually Is
Ask her what distinguishes good design, and she doesn't reach for the obvious answer. "The best design is when the people in the room don't notice it," she says. "They just think: I'd want this at home. They can't quite say why."
She is skeptical of design that photographs beautifully but lives badly. "If I can't put my feet up on the sofa, it might be beautiful design — but it's not good design. If I go into a restaurant and feel I can't laugh loudly or put my glass down without anxiety, that's not good design either. It can have won every award. But it's not for me."
What she designs for is ease. Presence. Atmosphere. In restaurant spaces specifically, she talks about creating pools of light around each table so that guests feel — even in a full room — as if they're almost alone. That's the goal: not spectacle, but the quiet sensation of being exactly where you want to be.
@ Katharina Raue
Fashion and Rooms Are the Same Conversation
Katharina Raue does not believe interior design and fashion can be meaningfully separated. Both, she argues, are expressions of personality, built from the same structural logic.
"When I design a restaurant, the hardware has to work — tables, chairs, everything functional. But you can't stop there. It would be like wearing a nice outfit with no earrings. The earrings are the napkins. The beautiful glass is the cool accessory. These details are what make a space — or an outfit — actually come alive."
She reads her clients through what they're wearing, not superficially but practically. "People generally wear what they feel comfortable in. That tells you a great deal about the colours and the level of visual complexity they'll feel good inside." She describes watching the person in front of her and translating: this is someone who layers textures rather than colours; this is someone whose comfort zone is a strong base with one expressive element.
Style, she says, isn't about following a direction — it's about having the confidence to be consistently yourself. She invokes Iris Apfel as someone whose aesthetic is immediately recognisable yet impossible to categorise. That's the aspiration: not a named style, but a signature.
Home Is Where You Can Be Exactly Who You Are
When Katharina moved into her husband's Berlin apartment, he had a designer sofa — pale blue, architectural, undeniably beautiful. She sat on it. She lasted about half an hour.
"A sofa has to be something you can sink into," she says. "You have to be able to lie in it." The designer sofa was eventually replaced with an oversized emerald velvet one, buried in cushions. She also has a heated blanket, which she mentions with evident delight.
The apartment itself is a negotiation. Her husband is highly sensitive to visual and sensory stimulation — he needs calm. So the shared space is grounded in quieter tones; the large furniture and rugs stay in a more restrained palette. Her studio, however, is a different world entirely: neon sign on the wall, prints in a hundred colours, objects that, in her words, shout at her to be noticed. "I need that," she tells us.
"A home should be an extension of your personality. When you come through the door, there has to be a place where you think: this is me. Where you can be exactly who you are — like in a perfect relationship, where you don't have to perform. That's what a home should give you."
© Katharina Raue
Katharina Raue is an interior designer, brand consultant, and set designer based in Berlin. She runs Studio Raue and Raue Consulting, the latter together with chef Tim Raue. This conversation was part of the HOMEISSUE Podcast, hosted by Alena Gröfler.
Listen to the episode in German
Cover Foto © Nils Hasenau Rolling Pin