BD 3

client: private person 

location: Prague
building type: apartment house

project: 2016

site: 260 m2

building footprint: 230 m2 
project phase: study
author: Markéta Zdebská,

Marek Žáček, Jana Horecká

visualisation: Jan Drška 

Situation: Corner apartment house suffered for decades by insensitive aesthetical and technical interventions. There are commercial spaces in the ground floor and rented apartments in the upper floors. The apartments' lower quality is mainly due to a poor quality of common spaces and also to a bad condition of technical facilities in the house.

Client: The task was to design improvements of the common spaces that are in a very dismal condition now. There's a lack of light and there's also a problematic connection to a basement of the house and a waste bin space, which generates unpleasant smell and overall degradation of common spaces. Another issue was a general revision of the technical facilities and consideration of new organization options.

Concept: The principal contribution of the concept is to open the ground floor common space into a courtyard, or more precisely, its renewal by demolition of storerooms of poor quality. Not only there will be lots of light coming into the common space from the courtyard but there are also the possibilities of placing waste bins and storage booths (and let the basement be commercial space), leaving bikes and baby strollers, planting a tree and spending time in protected outside space within central Prague there.
We arranged the technical facilities of the apartments in the other floors of the house so they could be easily and reasonably refurbished .
We renew the terrazzo on the floors in the classic old apartment houses' spirit and we emplace simple lighting, glass spheres hang over the corridors and LED strips line the curves of staircases. We replace the enamel paint of clay colour by white paint and we design shallow vertical grooves in the paint for the entrance hall.