Location: Kriebitzsch, Germany

Design Team: Heim Balp Architekten

Area: 520 m²

Year: 2025

Photography: Luca Girardini

Design Features: Haus am Milchberg stands in the centre of Kriebitzsch in Thuringia, Germany. Heim Balp Architekten transformed a roughly 150-year-old agricultural outbuilding into a 520 m² project and seminar house. Once the last surviving wing of a four-sided farmstead and threatened with demolition, the building now supports accommodation, gatherings, courses and temporary communal living at the centre of the village.

The programme is arranged over three levels. A historic vaulted room supported by four columns anchors the ground floor, together with a communal dining and event space, professional kitchen and bathhouse with sauna and rest room. Two guest-room units occupy the first floor and are reached from the new southern gallery. The attic contains additional sleeping space and an open yoga and seminar hall. Private rooms remain compact so that shared areas can take priority.

A deep, 28-metre-long external gallery is the renovation's defining move. Its slender timber frame reinterprets the region's half-timbered construction while combining circulation, shade and outdoor occupation. Photovoltaic panels sit on the gallery roof, allowing the main pitched roof to remain visually intact. The broad eaves protect the timber, and an external stair links the guest level directly to the garden.

Most of the original roof structure was retained, strengthened and extended only where required. Opening the former truss creates a long, column-free attic, while triangular roof loggias introduce daylight and distant views. Their guardrails follow the roof pitch and remain within its outline. New corrugated metal roofing recalls the building's agricultural use and gives the accumulated structure a clear overall profile.

Reuse continues through the construction details. Interior doors were salvaged from Berlin's Sony Center, existing roof windows were repurposed, and removed screed was cut into balcony slabs. An eight-centimetre wood-fibre lining improves the external walls, photovoltaic panels power two heat pumps, and collected rainwater serves the garden. Components are valued for the role they can still play rather than for whether they are new.

The street-facing north elevation remains restrained, while the garden side expresses communal life through white timber, the continuous gallery and an open stair. Pale white and grey surfaces reduce summer heat gain and place the new frame in quiet dialogue with older village structures. The project gives an overlooked agricultural remnant a social use, turning a modest intervention into a place for living, learning and meeting.

Design Team: Heim Balp Architekten was founded in Berlin in 2006 by German architect Michael Heim and Italian architect Pietro Balp. The practice works across housing, cultural and industrial buildings and urban design, with a sustained interest in adaptive reuse and the revitalisation of existing structures. Its projects favour limited but legible interventions that continue a place's material, scale and social relationships.

Antonio Seghini, Mehrdad Jabbari Basir, Marie-Sophie Waldminghaus and Ismet Bilgin worked on Haus am Milchberg. Studio C provided structural engineering, L&F Metallbau delivered metal and steel work, and BBIG advised on fire safety. Michael Heim is also one of the project's initiators, bringing architectural design, long-term operation and village cultural activity into the same process.