2024-03-15 17:41:29
In the shadow of the Brda hills, where the landscape is hidden in a misty haze in the morning, an apartment building has been built. It stands in a part of Bohutín called Vysoká Pec and offers housing for those who are attracted to living close to nature and at the same time do not want to deal with the maintenance of their own house. Apartments by studio Karnet architekti were created by the transformation of a former carpentry shop and an old school, which had long since served their purpose.
“The dysfunctional production area no longer made sense in this location, even from the point of view of urban planning and the future development of the village. We therefore quickly identified with the investor’s intention to build an apartment building on the site,” says studio manager Michael Karnet, adding that the architects did not want to go the route of new buildings, and therefore they tried to use as much of the original as possible. “We cleaned the volumes of the old buildings of the area to their basic shapes, used the generous yard as a parking lot and started designing a new stage for the place,” he adds.
Two of the original joinery buildings were preserved. The third one had to be torn down by the architects due to poor condition. On its floor plan, they then designed a new three-story building with a gable roof, connected balconies and wooden columns that visually unify the entire house. “We helped unify the entire volume into a continuous silhouette through the sequence. The apartments on the ground floor connect directly to the parking lot and use the original garden on the south side,” adds the architect.
The original school building, which the carpenter’s shop used as a warehouse, has thick brick walls and a high stone floor. After the reconstruction, the studio designed maisonette apartments with the ground floor at the level of the parking lot. They have private gardens and thanks to this, life in them is similar to that of terraced houses.