A bed, two meals, one price.

Grunewaldstraße runs quietly east to west through the middle of Schöneberg, a street of five-storey Altbau facades, corner bakeries and a supermarket two doors down. It is a residential street, not a tourist one. People live here. That is exactly why it works: you come home to a neighbourhood rather than to a strip of hotels.

Schöneberg has always been where Berlin goes to be itself. Around Nollendorfplatz, fifteen minutes north on foot, is the oldest queer quarter in the city — it has been the centre of Berlin's LGBTQ life since the 1920s, and it never stopped. A kilometre away on Hauptstraße, David Bowie rented a flat above a car-parts shop and made three albums that rearranged popular music; there is a plaque on the wall now. At Rathaus Schöneberg, John F. Kennedy stood in front of a crowd in 1963 and said he was a Berliner. The building still has a working paternoster lift you can ride.

The everyday version is better than the history. On Wednesday and Saturday mornings, Winterfeldtplatz holds the largest weekly market in Berlin — cheese, flowers, bread, secondhand coats — and on a Saturday it is the best hour in the district. Akazienstraße, a few minutes south, is a run of small shops and cafés where nothing is a chain. The Bavarian Quarter to the east is all wide streets and Art Nouveau doorways.

And when you want the loud Berlin, it is fifteen minutes away. Potsdamer Platz is 3.5 km, Kurfürstendamm and KaDeWe 3.3 km, and the U7 at the end of the street connects you to most of the city without changing.