dans arhitekti Opens Up Two 1957 Cooperative Terraced Houses in Ljubljana While Keeping Their Load-Bearing Walls

In 1957, Marko Šlajmer and his colleagues completed a row of terraced houses in Ljubljana's Mirje district for the housing cooperative "Progres". It was one of the first cooperative housing developments in the city, and it was built on a clear logic: rational construction, efficient use of space and a spatial concept that was ambitious for its time. Sixty-five years later, dans arhitekti has renovated two of those houses, 340 m² in total, for contemporary family life.

Renovations like this usually fail in one of two ways. Some freeze the original as a museum piece. Others gut it until only the address survives. dans arhitekti avoids both. The load-bearing walls stay where Šlajmer put them, because they had to, and the architects treat that fixed structure as a constraint to design around rather than a problem to hide. The small rooms of the 1950s plan open upward and sideways, and the interiors become a sequence of tall, light-filled spaces lined with oak, terrazzo and painted steel. The exterior barely changes.

A Postwar Experiment Worth Keeping

The archival photograph shows the block when it was new: tiled roofs, chimneys and rough ground that had not yet become gardens. The black-and-white survey shots taken before the renovation show the same houses decades later, with ivy, chain-link fencing, a skip in the yard and a balcony over a bay window at the rear. The architecture had aged, but it had not been lost.

That matters because cooperative housing from this period often gets treated as background building, too modest to protect and too dated to love. We read these images as the brief. The houses were sound, and the original thinking about compact, well-organised family homes still held up. What they lacked was space and light inside, and a renovation could supply both.

A Street Face Left Mostly Alone

From the street, the intervention is restrained. White render sits over a brick base, a blue metal fence runs along the front, and the brick-and-concrete gate posts stay in place. The gabled side elevation gets one confident addition: a tall black-framed window that hints at the vertical spaces behind it, alongside a black timber fence and a concrete wall.

This is the right call for a terraced ensemble. Row houses read as a collective, and a single owner's signature facade would break the rhythm Šlajmer designed. dans arhitekti keeps the shared language intact and saves its ambition for the interior, which is where the original houses needed help.

Cutting Upward Through a Compact Plan

The defining move is vertical. Seen from above, the dining space rises through two storeys under a timber ceiling, with a green glass chandelier hanging into the void and a wall of shelves beyond the table. At ground level, tall windows bring garden light across timber shelving, a concrete step and a turned wooden column.

The column deserves attention. Instead of hiding a structural element behind plasterboard, the architects turn it into a crafted object, closer to furniture than to engineering. In the oak-lined dining room with its herringbone floor, a sliding window frames a blossoming tree, and the garden becomes part of the room. In a house built on a tight 1950s grid, height and views out do more than extra floor area could.

Shelving as Architecture

Storage here is not a cupboard problem; it is the main interior material. Oak veneer walls carry staggered floating shelves with orange-painted undersides, a small touch that adds a line of colour under the ceramics. Elsewhere, floor-to-ceiling bookcases with yellow and navy cabinet doors fill whole walls, and the study becomes a room defined by what it holds.

This approach suits the fixed walls. When you cannot move the partitions, you can thicken them, line them and make them useful. The result is warmer and more personal than a minimalist white box. It also keeps clutter in a structured place, which matters in a family home of this size.

The Stair as the House's Spine

If the dining void is the showpiece, the staircase is the organising idea. Open oak treads and bright blue steel railings turn past a rough terrazzo wall, and because the risers are open, views and light pass straight through. From the ground floor, terrazzo steps rise beside an oak-fronted kitchen, so circulation and cooking share one continuous space.

The blue steel is a bold choice, and it works because it is used consistently. It marks movement through the house, from landing to study to attic. Looking through the stair to a person working at a black desk, you see how much the architects have gained by treating the stair as a transparent element rather than an enclosed shaft.

Material Contrasts from Kitchen to Attic

The palette is varied but disciplined: a concrete stair against a black kitchen counter and a wall of blue glazed tiles; herringbone parquet and a timber ceiling in the living room, where a window seat is set into a tall side window; and a terrazzo-topped sink under the sloping timber ceiling of the attic, lit from a skylight.

Each material has a job. Hard, mineral surfaces sit where water and wear demand them. Timber covers the places where people sit, read and rest. The attic, which in many houses of this age would be left as leftover roof space, becomes a usable room. That is one more way the renovation finds space within the original envelope instead of adding to it.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan places the houses at the corner of a street block, next to a wide diagonal road. The sections show how the interior volumes connect vertically, with trees and garden drawn into the lowest level. The axonometric explains the ensemble most clearly: pitched roofs, balconies and a street fence at the junction, an urban composition the renovation chose to leave alone.

Why This Project Matters

Europe holds a large stock of mid-century cooperative and social housing, and most of it is reaching the age when owners must decide whether to renovate, replace or simply put up with it. This project shows a fourth option. You can respect the structure and the shared street image while completely rethinking how light and space move inside. The constraint of fixed load-bearing walls ends up producing the project's character.

We also value the project's warmth. dans arhitekti does not turn Šlajmer's houses into minimalist showcases. It fills them with books, colour, crafted timber and visible materials, so the interiors feel lived in from the first day. Keeping the original buildings is a form of heritage work, and it is also a sustainable one. The care with which the inside has been reworked suggests these houses can serve another sixty-five years.

Renovation of two terraced houses of the housing cooperative "Progres - Mirje" by dans arhitekti. Location: Ljubljana, Slovenia. Area: 340 m². Year: 2022. Original architecture: Marko Šlajmer and colleagues, 1957. Photography: Miran Kambič.

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