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Renovation of a 135 m² desolate apartment in a (not historically protected) founder period house in the 7th district of Vienna. The floor plan typical for houses in the founder period, partially “modernized” in the 70s, also in the style of the time.
After analyzing the condition and determining every element of the apartment that was worth revitalizing in the sense of the historic original, the concept was decided: three rooms on the street side were restored in accordance with the preservation order: with double doors, box windows, restored parquet flooring. The rest, i.e. essentially where insensitive interventions were made a few decades ago, will be renewed as a clearly legible spatial unit. The material of the new casket within the founding period floor plan stands out decidedly. The choice fell on concrete, the “stone of our time”.
A large kitchen block flanks the passage to the private living room and is the first point of contact for arriving guests as well as a place for communal cooking. On the middle wall of the apartment, a floor-to-ceiling wall unit, like the kitchen block with a homogeneous surface of fiberglass-reinforced concrete slabs, contains the kitchen and storage space.
The hallway wall was removed, as well as another room partition and the wall of the small bathroom accessible from the hallway.
A new wooden wall, executed in the manner of a wallpapered door, combines the now enlarged bathroom and the anteroom of the guest toilet, which is used as a checkroom, into an adjoining room zone.
Painted with magnetic paint and black panel varnish, it is not only the analogous platform of intra-family communication, but at the same time the serving character of this side room zone is articulated. Which is all the more important because the entrance without threshold leads directly into the central lounge of the apartment, the heart of everyday and social life, where harmony should not be disturbed by door frames and handles.
The architects were interested in the fact that an old building apartment can not be completely new. So even where surfaces speak the language of the present, witnesses of the past charmingly break the concrete purism: for example, in the form of a special eye-catcher of the guest toilet, a Venetian mirror, which comes from the parental apartment inventory.
Material Homoenity continues behind the black wallpaper door. Here, too, concrete dominates.
While a cementitious flow coating on heated screed was used in the kitchen, Beton Ciré, translated as “waxed” or “polished” concrete, a jointless cementitious filler, was used for the floor and walls in the wet rooms. With no difference in level to the floor, the shower is inset, minimalistically separated by a glass panel.
Aligned with the wall, the large mirror above the bathtub reflects the light from the window overlooking the atrium and merges with the tall mirrored door cabinet at the end wall. The existing window, which is no longer original, was replaced by a reversible window that opens to the outside, which facilitates ventilation and does not affect items placed on the window sill.
planning and local construction supervision
address:
Kaiserstraße 91/1
1070 Vienna
client:
private
team:
Susanne Veit-Aschenbrenner
Oliver Aschenbrenner
Elis Hackaj
statics:
Gemeiner Haferl ZT GmbH
pictures:
© Hertha Hurnaus