House with LOFT

The late Art Nouveau house designed by architect Felix Neumann is a listed cultural monument. It was necessary to comprehensively reconstruct and revitalize it. The original ornate façade was preserved. The main platform of the house became a new loft apartment on the roof, which utilized the old musty truss and the poorly lit fifth floor. The glass façade of the loft spanning both floors connects the exterior of Masaryk Square and the house. The resulting outdoor terrace is shaded by solid aluminum slats in line with the original roof plane.

The realization of house No. 38 is dated around 1910. It was constructed for Sigmund Roth as a residential and commercial three-story basement building on a Gothic plot, as part of block development. The architect of the design is Felix Neumann, who significantly contributed to the reconstruction of the center of Ostrava at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He swiftly and distinctly captured the new trends of European taste of that time, which made him a sought-after builder of Art Nouveau, Neo-Baroque, and Neo-Renaissance buildings.
The modernization of house No. 38 mainly lies in providing a quality interior environment while preserving the principle of the original layout and expanding usable spaces. The house is equipped with an elevator serving all floors at intermediate landings. It is located in the free space of the light shaft behind the staircase. The rest of the light shaft is used to expand the social facilities on individual floors.

After all analyses and studies, we created several alternatives for how to approach the new mass of the roof to utilize the rooftop (attic) spaces. Our goal was to find a use for the 5th and 6th floors in the form of quality housing due to the depopulation of permanent residents from the city center. The house, under current hygiene standards, could not be fully utilized for living. However, it is important to introduce housing into the historical center. Our proposal involves creating a loft apartment spanning both floors, which needed to be directly illuminated and sunlit. This organizational principle stems from the existing attic space solution, which also has access from the central staircase on the 5th floor and is connected by an internal staircase to the 6th floor. Preserving the entire roof in its original form would not allow these spaces to be used in the long term, and they would thus become dead spaces in the house. Our design sensitively maintains the outline of the mansard roof and in no way disrupts the overall impression of this roof as perceived from the square. Even with the insertion of a vertical glass wall, the original outline of the mansard is preserved. The slanted external slats necessary for shading (the entire façade faces south) create vertical divisions in the original plane of the roof. This intervention will allow for the full utilization and revitalization of the entire house, as well as the revitalization of the square with new living spaces, reflecting the needs of the 21st century in symbiosis with the existing cultural monument. We believe that the entire proposal represents a contribution to a modern approach to the restoration and utilization of cultural monuments and can serve as an example of sensitive handling of historically significant elements.