Modern living in the old town
The townhouse on Viehmarkt in Neumarkt, Upper Palatinate, was completed after a construction period of only four months. Despite its modern appearance, the single-family house is carefully integrated into the existing architecture of the old town. Sanitary technology from the Emsdetten-based domestic technology specialist TECE was similarly carefully integrated into the bathroom architecture of the house.
For several years, the small 98-square-metre plot on the Viehmarkt lay fallow. The local authority wanted to build a residential building there, but rising costs brought the project to an end. Then the local architect couple Gudrun and Johannes Berschneider acquired the site and took matters into their own hands. After six months of planning and four months of construction, an exclusive residential building was built in a central location, which is now rented out by the couple.
The building with the grey-blue façade and orange entrance area is designed for one rental unit and has two garages and two terraces. The new building features the steep gable roof with narrow eaves typical of Neumarkt, which is prescribed by the city's height development plan.
The interior architecture designed by the Berschneiders is also eye-catching: the clever division of the rooms and the integration of built-in furniture into the architecture make the house look much more spacious from the inside than the compact structure would suggest from the outside. The entire building was constructed using pure timber, which ensures minimal energy requirements - a hidden photovoltaic system supplies electricity to an air-source heat pump, which in turn supports the heating system. Oak was used for the most part for the built-in furniture, floors and stairs. This gives the high-quality ambience a natural character. Gudrun Berschneider: "In the design, we relied completely on our own taste and built a house that we would also move into ourselves."
Despite the small footprint, a spacious 205 square metres of living space were created at Viehmarkt. The bathroom also shows that great importance was attached to freedom of movement. Here, a TECEdrainline shower channel was enclosed in an alcove and can be walked on freely - a cubicle was dispensed with. This has not only aesthetic but also practical advantages. Depending on the living situation, an ordinary shower can sometimes become an insurmountable obstacle or a tripping hazard. Thanks to the barrier-free shower, the bathroom can still be used in advanced age or with limited mobility. From the wide range of covers for the TECEdrainline, the Berschneiders chose the tileable "plate" trough in order to be able to use the same tile design as in the rest of the bathroom. All that remains visible is a plain gap in the floor. In this way, the shower channel, which is already inconspicuous, blends almost invisibly into the architecture of the room.
Like the rest of the house, the bathroom is also heated with underfloor heating that extends to the drain of the shower channel. This not only dries the shower water faster: cosy warmth while showering and warm feet afterwards are guaranteed. The house has a second, smaller bathroom, which is also equipped with the TECEdrainline plate. For reasons of space, the shower here was not designed to be barrier-free. Although the shower also manages without a cubicle or glass door, it is separated from the rest of the room by a threshold. In both bathrooms, the TECEsquare glass actuator is also used as a WC actuator plate. Here, too, aesthetic reasons were decisive in the decision. "We chose TECEsquare because of its reduced and timeless design, because we want the residents to feel comfortable in the house for a long time. The actuator plate is unobtrusive in appearance and glass is very popular in bathroom design," explains Gudrun Berschneider.
Despite this minimalism, of course, you don't have to do without the usual comfort: TECEsquare has a wide button for full flush and a narrow one for water-saving partial flush - self-explanatory at first glance.
It didn't take long for the Berschneiders to find a tenant - as is to be expected with an architecturally high-quality building in a central location. The blue-grey building on Viehmarkt has been occupied since the end of 2014.
Fotos: Team Weidinger; Petra Kellner
