Last July O Apartamento welcomed Freunde von Freunden, a Berlin project that gives visibility to creative and inspiring people with a sneak peek to their homes or/and workplaces. “Berlin” and “Friends of Friends”, their first printed books portraying stories of inspirational people, were presented at O Apartamento for the first time in Portugal. Torsten Bergler, one of the founders of FVF told us how it all started and what are their goals for the future.

Freunde von Freunden means ‘friends of friends’ and this is the pith of your project. Could you explain exactly what is FvF all about?

That’s not as easy as I thought it would be, when I get this question asked.

First of all, it’s about inspiration. Portraying inspirational people, in their homes and workplaces. But also inspire people with stories about food, cities, lifestyle etc. – It’s also about the network, the people that are friends, and friends of friends. It’s great to see what happens when (creative) people meet and get to know each other. And it’s also about that trust, that is there when you meet friends of friends, because they are friends of your friend, which gives instantly a different level of trust and relation.

You choose people before meeting the spaces. This means that for FvF what matters is the story behind the person who lives there?

Yes, exactly. The people that visited the FvF Website or read our books, usually think we select the people by their homes. But this actually never happened so far. Most of the time, we don’t know how the home or workplace looks like of the person we are about to portray, but we know about what he or she does, creates or did. And if this sounds like an interesting story, there’ll be an interesting home.

The founders of FvF are you (Torsten Bergler), Frederik Frede and Tim Seifert, but at the moment you have a team of 20 people working with you.  Back in 2009 when FvF was launched could you imagine the potential and the growth of this project?

Nope, never. And that was never the plan when we started. Back in 2009, just month after the financial crisis, our agency (NoMoreSleep) that Frede and I ran at that time, lost two major accounts. So we had time for a side project and always wanted to work on something without a client. And now we have a team of 20 people – MoreSleep and FvF combined, released two books, have over 120.000 Fans on FB and over 25.000 visitors on the site every day. That’s crazy!

Nowadays your project exists in the form of an online magazine, two published books and some collaborations with product designers. Can you unveil what can we expect from FvF in the future?

We are planning and working on a lot of stuff. A renewed design of the website is on top of our list right now, we are also working on a print magazine, great client projects and of course developing the whole experience and brand further.