Adaptive reuse of a 1950s’ small hotel
into an office building, Kefalari, Athens
The rearrangement of a small sixty-year-old hotel (4 floors of 335 sq. m. area each) into an office building.
The existing volume would be retained, as it exceeded by far the maximum volume allowed by current building regulations. However, the old structure would be fully reconfigured. Apart from the positioning of the peripheral structural columns, everything else would be new. All internal columns would be removed, the leveling and height of the floors were to be changed, a conference room with the privilege of wide open views would be added on the roof along with a roof garden, creating a fifth floor to the building, and an additional underground area would be constructed next to the existing basement, offering parking spaces under the street-level garden. The newly formed grid of the structure followed the non-perpendicular angle of the corner of the two streets.
A key design factor was the re-designation of the back of the building as the new principal façade, to include the main entrance and access to parking spaces. Facing a large garden, the new façade was reconfigured with the addition of an added-on metallic structure to form a series of balconies with a vertical screen of climbing greenery. The metallic structure also included the addition of a secondary staircase, and topped off with a roof pergola adjoining the new conference room on the roof of the building. As the new shell of the building, a curtain wall of vertical wooden blades would wrap around the rest of the facades (glass), to offer shade from the sun as well as privacy from the street corner. Modern simplicity to be applied to detailing and materials.