The story.

"We did not come to Brandenburg looking for a home. We came because we needed a break, and because our old dog needed somewhere she would be welcome."

How it started

On the second morning, walking through the fog, the place made its case.

We had booked two weeks in a house we did not love, in a village we had never heard of. But when the fog lifted on that first walk, something quietly happened. The fields, the canal, the silence. We went back to the rental, and the idea was sitting between us. Half-formed, slightly absurd, stubbornly alive.

"We were not trying to start a business. We were trying to build the place we ourselves had been looking for and never quite found."

- KOBI & VINCENZO

The village

We gave ourselves permission to pretend.

A day or two after that first walk, we saw a sign on one of the houses in the Hafendorf. An open weekend was being held that Saturday to sell the last few empty plots in the village. Kobi suggested we go. Not to buy. Just to see. Let us pretend, just for a weekend, that we are the kind of people who could think about something like this.

We were handed a map with the available plots marked. We walked through the village with Choya, going from one plot to another, half-pretending we were really buyers, half just enjoying the absurdity of it. At one of the plots, Choya stopped and did what dogs do. We looked at each other. We called it a sign. She chose this one. We did not argue with her.

But the next two weeks turned the game into something else. We set up the rental's kitchen table as a makeshift office: Kobi called brokers and applied for financing. Vincenzo kept working his day job from the other side of the table and kept asking the question he always asks: yes, but how would that actually work?

Mostly, the banks said no. We heard a lot of nos. We did not expect a yes.

A few months later, somehow, we did. We heard a "yes."

Building slowly

We moved into an empty house and lived in it before we furnished it.

Construction took longer than expected. The pandemic slowed everything. But Choya came on every drive out from Berlin. She walked the boundary. She sat where the kitchen would be. She lay in the dirt where the floor would later run.

When we finally got the keys, we did something most builders do not. We moved in with almost nothing and slowly lived in the house. We wanted to feel what it actually asked for, room by room, hour by hour, before we decided how to fill it.

Furniture and objects came in slowly, over months. Each piece was chosen because it did something specific for a real day. By the time we opened the doors to guests, ABAITA had stopped being a project. It had become a home.

What ABAITA means.

The name comes from two languages. Two words that mean the same thing in different ways.

HEBREW

ha-baita

The movement toward home. The journey homeward. Strictly first person. Only you can go ha-baita.

Italian

a baita

Going to the cabin. The mountain shelter. The act of moving toward a place of refuge.

Your hosts

Two people. Two ways of seeing. One house.

Kobi is a designer. He has spent most of his working life thinking about how spaces hold people. Not how they look in photographs, but how they feel at seven in the morning when the light comes through at a low angle. He is the one who moved a lamp two centimeters until the room suddenly felt right. Who lived in this house for months before a single guest arrived, testing every corner, asking what each room actually wanted to be.



Vincenzo is a storyteller. He brought to ABAITA what most rentals never have: a voice. He is the warmth you feel when you walk in. He grew up understanding what a long Italian Sunday does to a room, what the right table can do for people who love each other, what it means to be genuinely received rather than merely accommodated. That instinct is in the walls here, even if you cannot point to it.

They are different in almost every useful way. Kobi tends to dream first. Vincenzo tends to ask the next question. Without Kobi, ABAITA would never have begun. Without Vincenzo, it would still be a beautiful idea halfway through execution.

When they built this house, they were not trying to create a rental. They were trying to build the place they had both been looking for and never quite found.

The house is, even now, theirs in the sense that they built it. It is also, for the days you are in it, yours.

We hope the word applies to you here, even briefly. Even for a few days. That would be enough.