What exactly is FOUND?

Berlin just gained one of its largest dancefloors in years. FOUND sits in Tempelhof-Schöneberg, inside a building with a long nightlife memory: an old Schultheiss brewery that held the first KitKatClub from 2001 to 2004 before spending years as Malzfabrik, an events hall for corporate hire. It now reopens as an 8,500-capacity complex of indoor and outdoor spaces. Mika Schröter took it over in March and frames it less as a club than as "a platform for music, culture and creative exchange," run, he says, on "quality rather than hype." District mayor Jörn Oltmann waved the project through as something that strengthens the area's cultural pull, which in Berlin is rarely a given.

Why was Watergate the one to open it?

The symbolism is hard to miss. Watergate spent more than two decades as one of Berlin's defining intimate clubs, its glass wall looking out over the Spree, before it shut that Kreuzberg home at the end of 2024, blaming rents it could no longer carry and a post-pandemic dip in tourism. Rather than disappear, it turned itself into an open-air and touring brand, with a season at SAGE Berlin running May to September and now this. FOUND's first night, on 27 June, was a Watergate open air that ran from afternoon into the small hours, led by DJ Heartstring and Interplanetary Criminal alongside DJ Spit, THC and a cast of locals.

What does a giant new room mean for Berlin?

Here is the argument. Berlin has watched a string of beloved rooms go dark, Watergate among them, Wilde Renate winding down, the constant pressure of rent and redevelopment that the city files under "clubsterben." Into that gap steps an 8,500-capacity hall in a converted brewery, which is the opposite of the small, sweaty, members-feel space the scene mythologises. Some will read FOUND as proof the culture is resilient and reinventing itself. Others will see another step toward big-room, festival-scale clubbing in a city built on the intimate kind. The honest answer is that both can be true, and the room itself will settle it over a season.

A club that loses its home and keeps the name alive is its own kind of Berlin story.