Adaptive reuse study, hotel to apartment building, Studená

On paper the building in Studená is a hotel. On the ground floor, though, sits a 165.47 m² hall with a stage, a layout that belongs to a community venue rather than to guest accommodation. For Charles Bridge Investments we first recorded the existing condition, 74 rooms and 1,265.22 m² of room area on a built-up area of 757 m², and then tested what else the building could be. The study sets out 24 apartments and 18 parking spaces.

The building in Studená, in the South Bohemian region, is registered for use as a hotel, yet its plan says something different. The ground floor holds a 165.47 m² hall, a 58.83 m² stage, a second smaller hall, backstage rooms, a bar and two dining rooms. Guest rooms only appear on the two floors above. The brief for the study followed from that. Can this become an apartment building, and how many units would fit? That question cannot be answered from a desk. It first has to be clear what actually stands on site and in what condition.

Work therefore started with an as-built survey. The package covers a project report and a summary technical report, a site sketch, schematic and dimensioned floor plans from the basement up to the top floor, two vertical sections, elevations from all four sides, a roof plan and a room schedule. The drawings are at 1:100. Only on that base did the new-state Revit model and the study drawings follow. Apartment areas are scheduled under Czech Government Decree 366/2013 Sb., which separates usable area, the footprint of vertical structures and the resulting floor area. The figure the investor sees in the study is therefore the same figure that later appears in sales documentation.

The design splits the building into 24 apartments, nine at ground level, eleven on the floor above and four on the top floor, with a mezzanine in between the upper two levels. Total areas per level in the study schedule are 515.54 m² at ground level, 588.84 m² on the floor above, 125.84 m² for the mezzanine and 212.98 m² for the top floor. The 156.36 m² basement takes cellars, plant rooms and shared spaces, and the site plan allows for 18 parking spaces. The client received floor plans of every level in PDF and DWG, elevations from all four sides, an axonometric view, five full-page visualisations and a 21 page presentation report issued under the name Rezidence Studená. The same handover included the full existing-condition documentation, so the designer of the next stage has the building as it stands and the building as proposed side by side.

Project challenges

The ground floor is the hard part. A 165.47 m² hall with a stage cannot simply be divided by partitions, because each new apartment needs its own daylight, its own entrance off a shared corridor and a route to the risers. The structure is the second issue. The walls are mixed stone and brick masonry, the building has no thermal insulation, and the survey states plainly that no probes and no other invasive investigation were carried out and that the foundations were not examined in detail. For planned interventions into load-bearing structures the report calls for a targeted geotechnical investigation and an assessment by a structural engineer. That is the normal limit of an as-built survey and it is worth saying out loud, because this is usually where the budget of a conversion is decided. The third difficulty is the shape of the building. It has a basement, three above-ground floors, a mezzanine and an unused attic, and the storey heights are not equal, 3.70 m from the ground floor to the one above and 3.50 m from there to the top floor. A layout therefore cannot simply be repeated from one level to the next.

Project outputs

• Project report, summary technical report and site sketch for the existing condition
• Schematic and dimensioned floor plans from basement to top floor at 1:100
• Vertical sections A-A' and B-B', elevations from all four sides and a roof plan
• Room schedule of the existing condition, 74 rooms and 1,265.22 m² of room area
• New-state floor plans including the mezzanine, in PDF and DWG
• Schedule of 24 apartments with areas under Czech Government Decree 366/2013 Sb.
• New-state elevations from all four sides and an axonometric view
• Five full-page visualisations of the converted building
• A 21 page presentation report of the study
• A complete package of the existing and the proposed state, ready for the next design stage