Silver Winner of the International Architecture & Design Awards 2025
Architect / Designer:
Maren Dannien, Matthias Roller
Studio:
Dannien Roller Architekten + Partner
Design Team:
Theresa Esser, Andi Ramici
Copyright:
Dietmar Strauss, Besigheim
Country:
Germany
The two-storey house in the style of the Italian Renaissance was built in 1887 as a villa for a merchant by the architect Markus Zimmermann. The structure is a listed building due to its sophisticated bourgeois architecture, together with the garden and enclosure.
Today it is used as a municipal daycare center for four groups.
The entrance with the sandstone staircase has been covered by a new canopy. The roof, its construction and the associated fall protection are in a golden metallic color and match with the natural stone-hued clinker brick, the sandstone flaps and bands of the façade. The design of the railings is contemporary and picks up on the façade’s grainy structure.
The refurbishment included adapting the spaces to current regulations. On the first floor
a new food preparation kitchen and a children’s kitchen with a dining room were integrated. The staff rooms are located on the upper floor. In the basement there is an exercise area for the children. The stairwell was necessarily upgraded for fire protection. The building surfaces in the common rooms were refurbished and restored, and the sanitary areas were completely renovated. The external sandstone staircase was refurbished and received a new canopy.
The roof had to be repaired.
The recycling of materials was a high priority. For example, existing tiles were carefully removed, stored and reinstalled. The new tiles to be replaced were engobed in the same color.
In the interior, the acoustic ceiling panels from an external school project could be reused.
Floor coverings such as terrazzo floors and parquet were refurbished, and the linoleum was neatly cut out in damaged areas and graphically replaced in similar colors.
Doors from the stairwell that had no fire protection were carefully removed and reused as room doors. The new fire doors are consciously inserted as new black-grey steel and glass framed doors.
The color concept of the rooms deals playfully with the diversity found. The rooms are adapted to the existing building in light blue, warm gray, mustard yellow and clear green.
The historic wooden doors, wooden windows, wooden paneling and skirting boards were given a white paint finish and run like a connecting ribbon throughout the entire building.
The children’s kitchen is located in the former salon in the position of the original fireplace. As a reminiscence of the warming stove, it is formally designed like a hearth and marks the place where the children come together to eat every day.
Dannien Roller Architekten + Partner
Architecture is not objective, but influenced by processes, requirements, budgets and cultural-spatial conditions. Our early cooperation with the client – as early as the task development stage – creates a qualitative coherence between the construction project, urban integration, space, form and material. This not only creates an unmistakable building culture, but also a high level of recognition.
Our focus is on the workplace: the place where we spend most of our lives awake. Although we live in a world that is becoming more and more mobile from day to day, administration and production, research and teaching, education and training, and work, are linked to physical places. This topos requires both material and emotional criteria, to which we respond creatively, innovatively and with outstanding design quality.