From a humanistic high school straight to dental school, then a career in journalism, later a bestselling author, and now a sought-after interior designer – Katja Kessler has reinvented herself several times over. In the podcast “Der Finanz-Gourmet,” she talks to Carolin Tsalkas and Oliver Morath about her unusual journey.
In the podcast, she provides fascinating insights into the world of design, exposes the most common mistakes in interior design, and reveals her three secrets to success. “The opportunity will present itself at some point,” she says, “but you have to seize it.”
Instead of taking over her father’s practice, Kessler interned at the Axel Springer publishing house and caused a stir with her front-page articles about nude photos of the BILD newspaper. She was given her own column and reported on high society at home and abroad for four years. In 2002, Kessler married Kai Diekmann, then editor-in-chief of Bild and later publisher of the Bild Group. The two have four children[1] and live in Potsdam.
“I was bathed in dragon’s blood,” Kessler says of her path. Studying dentistry, which she completed at her father’s request, felt “like Carnival.” But the courage to change paid off: As a journalist for the Bild newspaper, she met celebrities such as the Dalai Lama and Brad Pitt, spent a year with Dieter Bohlen for his biography (sales: one million copies) and experienced bizarre moments with Prince Albert in Cannes.
Kessler also published in the FAZ, the Für Sie and the Welt am Sonntag and wrote with Dieter Bohlen his biographies Nothing but the Truth (2002) and Behind the Scenes (2003). For her work she has been awarded, among other things, the Champagne Prize for Joie de Vivre[3] and – together with Bohlen – the Golden Feather. This prize was awarded because the book “was the first time that the feature sections of well-known newspapers dealt with the phenomenon of the tabloids”.[4] Her first novel, Heartbeats, was published in 2007, followed in 2008 by The Mommy Book: Pregnancy, Birth and the Ten Months After, and in 2009 she published Ask Me Honey, I Know Better, a novel in which she writes partly autobiographically about her marriage to Diekmann. On March 8, 2011, Kessler’s funny and factual stories, “The Schatzi Experiment or The Day I Decided to Train My Husband,” were published. In 2014, she published “Silicon Madness: How I Emigrated to California with Schatzi.”
Kessler also appeared as a “parenting expert” on the RTL program “Erwachsen auf Probe.”
She has been self-employed as an interior designer since 2018. In November 2023, four of her interior design projects—Villa Meeresstern and Das Kulm (both in the Baltic Sea resort of Heringsdorf), Berlin’s “Ullsteinhalle,” and the “H1” in Bielefeld—were nominated for the SBID Award in London, which Villa Meeresstern ultimately won.