Štajnhaus

ORA architects took a very old house with a Baroque and Renaissance core from the 16th century, which has been damaged many times over the years, and turned it into an exquisite guest house located in the former Jewish quarter of Mikulov (Nikolsburg) in Czech Republic.

  The Štajnhaus has not been a project, but rather a process. This house with a Renaissance core stands right at the foot of the chateau hill, in the former Jewish quarter of Mikulov. Throughout its existence it has suffered a great many scars, and it has gone through tens of reconstructions and operations. All of these have altered the house beyond recognition, yet it has maintained its almost medieval picturesqueness.

“We came to a pudding stone”, the architects explain. “The more individual layers, spaces and surprising circumstances we uncovered, the more revisions and alterations we had to make in our project; and this lasted, in fact, until the end of realisation.” ORA wanted to preserve the house as an organic unit. The house doesn’t have a straight wall or a rectangular opening, so they had to reinvent and remake to measure all the elements.

The original task was to just rethink the interior design. Gradually, however, the architects realized that the interior and exterior could not be solved separately, as the space and the shapes tend to blend together and create an indivisible unit. The house has been reconstructed for the needs of a guest house, a part of it will be used as a private flat for the owner. Each room is unique, and has its own specific atmosphere, while the wine cellars at the basement have come back to their original use.

Štajnhaus, Mikulov, Nikolsburg, Czech Republic
Program: house renovation
Architects: ORA
Team: Jan Hora, Barbora Hora, Jan Veisser, Dalibor Klusáček (collaborator)
Completion: 2017