Building in existing buil­dings: The fairy tale of the ugly duckling

For HOLIDAYARCHITECTURE Fre­derik Fischer talked to owner Patrick Petzold and architect Hans Sasse, who tog­ether trans­formed a WBS70 pre­fa­bri­cated building on the edge of the Mär­kische Schweiz Nature Park into the present-day Palais Brut.

How did you come up with the idea of trans­forming this pre­fa­bri­cated building into the Palais Brut?

Patrick Petzold: It took a lot of small steps. I know the region well because I bought a bun­galow nearby about ten years ago and spent a lot of time there with my family – espe­cially during the lockdown. During this time, the plan to transform a pre­fa­bri­cated building matured. I dis­co­vered the pro­perty on Immo­Scout, went there with my wife and we were both imme­diately enthu­si­astic about the location, the pro­perty and the dimen­sions of the building. In the secret hope that he would talk us out of this crazy idea, I called Hans Sasse, an architect whom I have trusted for a long time. My hope was in vain. Hans was also enthu­si­astic.

What hap­pened next?

Patrick Petzold: We needed a loan and went looking for a bank. My wife and I were both employed and were earning well. I was the­r­efore con­fident that we would have no pro­blems with the financing. That was a mistake. One after another, the banks rejected us. We were not the problem. The problem was the type of building. Most of the banks we spoke to simply would not finance pre­fa­bri­cated buil­dings.

Did you just guess that or did the banks tell you that expli­citly?

Patrick Petzold: Several banks were quite open about it. One bank would have financed us, but only with 30 per cent equity at a time when a maximum of 10 per cent was the market rate. However, we were lucky enough to be able to con­vince the local savings bank. If I had known how exhausting the financing alone would be, I pro­bably wouldn’t have started the project.

The financing was cer­tainly not going to be your last challenge.

Patrick Petzold: That’s right, but the fun clearly out­weighed the chal­lenges as the project pro­gressed. For example, the planning didn’t begin on the com­puter: I built a model, Hans came over for dinner and then we juggled with the indi­vidual modules until we had found the ideal room layout. That evening, we came up with pretty much the exact floor plan that you can see today.

Was it that simple?

Patrick Petzold: Well, we were lucky on several occa­sions. For example, a former col­league of Hans’s who had studied this par­ti­cular con­s­truction method in the GDR and still had a lot of docu­ments on this type of pre­fa­bri­cated building helped us with the statics. He pointed out that we needed addi­tional steel girders in the living room with the high cei­lings. Without this infor­mation, we would not have been able to implement the room plan in this form. If we had done without the breakth­rough in the ceiling, ever­y­thing would have been much easier. You can remove the par­tition walls at will without end­an­gering the statics. Nevert­heless, I am glad that we decided to do it. This special sense of space was worth all the effort.

Was it always the plan to turn the building into two holiday apart­ments?

Hans Sasse: No, initially it was about opti­mally accen­tuating the qua­lities of the prefab and the location. Ori­gi­nally, it wasn’t even clear how the building should be rented out. The idea to divide it into a small apartment and an apartment for a family or a small group came from Jan Hamer, the founder of HOLIDAYARCHITECTURE. We got in touch with him early on and from the start he was very open and helpful.

How did you move from the planning stage to the imple­men­tation stage?

Patrick Petzold: Hans drew up cal­cu­la­tions that we essen­tially adhered to. We pre­pared the tenders on this basis. Only the con­crete cutting threa­tened to blow the costs. For­t­u­nately, we then found a company in Wroclaw that carried out the work at a reasonable cost. However, the addi­tional steel that we had to install to rein­force for the structure made it more expensive than planned.

How did it feel to award a con­tract to a company to gut the entire building?

Patrick Petzold: I had an uneasy feeling. In my mind’s eye, I watched the building col­lapsing several times. Nevert­heless, we trusted the company. They seemed com­petent and expe­ri­enced and were really keen on the project. And I had worked with Hans quite often over the last ten years, so there was mutual trust and under­standing. In addition to my work as an audio pro­ducer, I have also worked fre­quently as a car­penter, and in this capacity I have also worked with Hans.

Did you reco­gnise any special fea­tures during the process? Were there any positive sur­prises?

Patrick Petzold: The views still inspire me today. If you stand in the large apartment up on the gallery and look out of the new window dia­go­nally opposite, you have a won­derful view over the fields. We hadn’t ima­gined it to be so beau­tiful. I remember standing in the shell for the first time with this new opening: the sun was setting and filling the whole room with golden light.

Can you tell us some­thing about the history of your prefab?

Patrick Petzold: According to resi­dents, the prefab was not even finished when the Wall came down. It is a reminder of the fall of the Wall and stood as a win­dowless shell in the land­scape. It was planned as a dwelling for workers of the neigh­bouring LPG [Agri­cul­tural Pro­duction Coope­rative]. Via the Treuhand [Trust Agency set up by the former East German Government to repri­vatise East German enter­prises], the building initially went to an investor from Düs­seldorf. He sold it to two men from the area. They rented out one half of the building. There was a wellness bathroom in the basement. There was also a bathroom in each of the rooms ups­tairs. The building was known as ‘Salon Cherie’ and, well, it looked very much like a brothel. The other half was only used for storage. Nothing worked there any longer. No heating, no water. It seems that young people used to party there a lot. I still have countless photos of the graffiti on the walls. One of them showed the prefab. Above it was written: ‘My home’. That moved me.

Hans, how do you explain that there are com­pa­ra­tively few con­ver­sions of pre­fa­bri­cated buil­dings? After all, you have proven that a high quality of living can be created in a prefab at a reasonable cost.

Hans Sasse: The image is simply bad and many pre­fa­bri­cated buil­dings stand quite lost in the land­scape. That puts people off. There is also a lack of good examples. And then many also feel over­whelmed by the dimen­sions of a prefab. Anyone planning a house for their family would not think of using a pre­fa­bri­cated building for it. For insti­tu­tional investors, on the other hand, the poor con­di­tions offered by the banks for this type of building are a real stumbling block.

Patrick Petzold: It is also an East-West issue. GDR archi­tecture is repea­tedly and aggres­sively vilified. The Palace of the Republic is just one of many examples. But to be honest, you also have to say that the buil­dings, too, had dis­ad­van­tages from an objective point of view. The acou­stics are one of them, but the rooms are also mostly too small for today’s living requi­re­ments. With the Palais Brut, however, we can hop­efully show that the rooms can also be extremely spa­cious. So far, we have not noticed any pro­blems with the acou­stics either.

How did you come up with the name?

Patrick Petzold: We just wanted a name that sounded good. Not so tech­nical, not blunt mar­keting. Some houses have such old-fashioned names like ‘Elfriede’. That’s the direction we were headed in at the beginning. Pre­fa­bri­cated buil­dings usually only have unro­mantic type desi­gna­tions like WBS70. That would have been a nice con­trast.
Palais Brut, on the other hand, felt right imme­diately and still does today. I am French myself, born and raised in France, and so the French name didn’t sound affected to me. Besides, the hint cannot be over­looked. A prefab is the opposite of a palace. And Brut, of course, comes from ‘bru­talism’.

How has the response been so far?

Patrick Petzold: The rental has got off to a very good start. The enthu­si­astic comments on HOLIDAYARCHITECTURE are addi­tional moti­vation. Some guests are already com­pletely enchanted before they arrive, just from looking at the photos. Thanks to HOLIDAYARCHITECTURE, we are also rea­ching exactly the people we want to reach. The col­la­bo­ration was a great stroke of luck. After three years of con­s­truction, I also had my doubts. I was often alone on the con­s­truction site and occa­sio­nally won­dered if we were building a castle in the air here. The relief is all the greater now.

Interview: Fre­derik Fischer

Photo credits: © Tobias König and Michael Rom­stöck / / KKROM Ser­vices (interior and exterior shots), © Patrick Petzold (model, graffiti, before images)

Author info: Fre­derik Fischer grew up in a village and spent his youth in a small town in Bavaria, then set out into the big wide world. He studied Media Studies and Eco­nomics in Han­nover, Aarhus, Ams­terdam, London and Washington, and co-founded several Startups in Berlin. However, he has since become con­vinced that the truly exciting designs for the future are created in the pro­vinces. He has been con­sis­t­ently pro­moting these for years, among other things, as managing director of Neu­landia.