CONVERSION TO AN APARTMENT BUILDING | BRNO - ŽIDENICE

The subject of the design, a three-storey building with a residential attic, which currently serves as a family house with three separate apartments, is located on a sloping plot on Škrochova Street in the Brno-Židenice district.

According to the client’s wishes, the task for our studio was to change the functional use of this building, which dates back to the 1990s, from a detached family house to an apartment building, which makes full use of the potential and capacity of the building.

The mass of the building itself is left almost unchanged. Modifications to the exterior occur only at the level of the new material and color solution of the façade, which combines a smooth white plaster with clinker cladding in the design. It is directly connected to the original material solution of the brick fencing, which separates the land itself from the street. Clinker cladding is used mainly for window linings in order to visually separate them from the rest of the facade. To partially accentuate the significant mass of the entrance and the communication core, the clinker cladding was also applied in the space between the lintel and the windowsill on the first and second floors. The design also envisages the greening of the façade with climbing ivy, for which a supporting network was designed here as to prevent uncontrollable overgrowth of the plant and possible damage to the building.

The biggest adjustments then take place in the layout of the building. While the original layout created excess corners and empty spaces, and thus inefficiently used the possible capacity of the house, the new layout divides the floors into two modern apartments of 3+KK and 2+KK, thus making full use of their potential while creating suitable spaces for families with children and young couples. The individual floors of the house are then connected by the original communication core with a direct staircase.

Each of the apartments is equipped with a new entrance area with a separate cloakroom or reserved space for wardrobes, a sanitary core with a separate toilet, a living room with a kitchenette and a bedroom. There is also a room for housework and a cleaning room. Larger apartments are then complemented by a children’s room.

The house also has a smaller garden, which is reserved mainly for the 3+KK apartment located on the first underground floor, garage parking, utility room and cellar storage space for apartments that do not have their own closed cloakroom.