The HO department store was built in 1958 on a corner site of a destroyed tenement building in Berlin Friedrichshain. He is positioned in the rear portion of the property and has provided along the streets a triangular garden available to the public.
The new owners have aquired the property in order to implement in this particular situation, an urban garden. The quality of a house with a garden is integrated directly into the dense structure and complexity of the inner city. The result is a house with two units whose living spaces merge continuously under a canopy with the garden in the southern part of the lot.
The garden is now a very unusual constellation aligned to the streets and gives the ensemble a very special location and quality in the urban network. The generosity of the former showrooms combined with the intimacy and privacy of the storage areas and adjacent rooms of the former shop is now used by the new apartments.
Besides discovering and exposing the interior qualities of the existing building, the location of the garden along the roads has shown a special challenge in the transformation of the property. In the surrounding area, a private garden is a new element that must seek contact and find a dialogue with its surroundings.
According to this the garden was enclosed by a fence construction having sufficient thickness and volume in order to continue the bulk of the adjacent house walls, which is also sufficiently transparent in order to ensure communication and familiarization between the garden and the road space.
