Intervention, consolidation and functional conversion of a historic garage, Plevnei Street, Bucharest

A car garage on Calea Plevnei, former stable, ends up being listed on the list of historical monuments. Can you imagine the joy on the owner’s head … Heavy approvals from various commissions, difficult and expensive procedures, certified builders on monuments, so more expensive … For a garage …

He thinks what he thinks and puts his idea on the table: let’s try to highlight it by turning it into a building with a more distinguished function … Maybe a chic cafe or confectionery, maybe a law firm … And maybe we can do something extra for the house, so that it doesn’t look like a shoebox between the Students’ House, the Romanian Opera and the future mall at Casa Radio … So we start working on Horia, arriving on in the archives, he finds out that we are talking about a former royal stable … King Ferdinand had some horses there, and later King Mihai decides to turn it into a garage for some of his cars. That is why they classified it as a historical monument. So, no pressure …

From now on, all proposals are made in two scenarios. One conservative and one more daring, to put them in front of the beneficiary, then the monument commission. Easy to intuit and notice that we like more the bolder version, with the uneven elevation of the building body. It makes a smart transition, in a regulated surface, between the cornices and the asynchronous ridges of the neighboring buildings on the street front. Moreover, it generates a larger interior volume, which could easily make room for an additional soup, in a small house where every square meter is valuable.

Rigid surface … hmm … a first cautious reaction of the beneficiary … “What surface? Rigid ?! Gentlemen, I don’t want to upset you, but which builders will know how to execute it? Their hammers will be knotted. .. “Ruben jumps like a burnt:” Why doesn’t he know how to execute it? It’s not a big deal. . with many more benefits.

The Monuments Commission decreed not to complicate matters, and since then the project has entered a linear, flat track. But only until the construction site stage, when, as the works progressed, the builder and the beneficiary became more and more difficult to understand each other about the costs. Complications for subsidies, you can see that during the consolidation we missed I don’t know what anchorage was distributed and we destroyed the wall and some bosses that now need to be rebuilt, but also a little relocated, because I don’t know what window failed us on the indicated position And when they reached the roof, the copper sheet left to cover a simple and relatively small surface of the frame became, suddenly, obscenely expensive and unjustified for a roof, isn’t it, a bit bland. So after an argument that was hard to keep within the limits of decency, the people put their metal plate on us, we don’t even care about which one in their head, and they made the reception.

Since then we pass by sighing for a long time in the area if we can’t not pass at all …

Today the building is rented to a car parts store. Forgiveness, Your Majesty!