Christoph Wagner and Wenke Schladitz Turn a Brandenburg Farmhouse into a Goldsmith's Home and Studio

There is a particular kind of renovation that refuses to pretend the building was born yesterday. The House for a Goldsmith, designed by Christoph Wagner and Wenke Schladitz in the village of Lanke, half an hour north of Berlin, is that kind of project. An early 20th-century farmhouse in Mark Brandenburg, its agricultural use probably ended sometime in the 1950s. By the time the architects arrived, the building had already been carved into four separate flats. One tenant stayed, and their flat remains untouched. The rest of the 380 square meters was reorganized into a 140-square-meter, two-storey flat and a working goldsmith's studio, all oriented toward the surrounding garden.

What makes this project worth studying is not the transformation itself but the discipline behind it. Cracks were only repaired where structurally necessary. Large areas of the existing fabric were deliberately left alone. The architects describe the result as an intermediate stage, not a finished building, but architecture that will continue to evolve with its occupants. That philosophy, applied with real material intelligence, produces rooms that feel inhabited rather than curated.

The Circular Window as Architectural Event

The formerly windowless gable wall now carries a large, off-center circular window that admits morning sun deep into the house. It is the building's most conspicuous new element, and the detailing is worth unpacking. The aperture is cut directly into a cross-laminated timber (CLT) panel, milled so that the glass sits without a separate frame. A curved brass plate, fabricated by blacksmith Ralf Priess in nearby Bernau, wraps the exterior perimeter. It directs rainwater away from the timber and reflects light further into the interior.

Seen from the street or through the spring orchard, the round opening reads as a deliberate puncture in a patched brick wall, its geometry in quiet tension with the gable's triangular silhouette and the church spire visible beyond. It is at once a functional device and a signal that something new is happening inside this old envelope.

Patched Walls and the Ethics of Non-Renovation

The street-facing facade tells the story plainly. Brickwork from different eras sits side by side: original masonry, later infill, patches of render. Rather than unifying these surfaces under new plaster, the architects let the patchwork remain legible. The covered concrete porch, with its exposed columns and a bare tree growing alongside the wall, reinforces the sense that the building is not frozen in a single moment but accumulating time.

This restraint is more than aesthetic preference. The existing double-shell spandrel masonry in the outer walls was retained, and demolition bricks were reused for non-load-bearing interior partitions. By working with what was already there, the project avoids the material waste and embodied carbon of a gut renovation. It also avoids the dishonesty of a building that pretends its history began last year.

The Garden Side and Spatial Reorientation

The rear elevation reveals a different character. A concrete porch extension sits beneath the yellow brick upper floor, framing views into the autumn garden. The living spaces were deliberately reoriented toward this side, trading the street for the landscape. A large terrace window on the south facade, made possible by an externally positioned balcony projection that supports the masonry above without internal columns, collapses the boundary between interior and garden.

Inside, glazed doors open onto the trees, and the palette shifts to olive-painted walls and reclaimed parquet flooring salvaged from other demolished buildings. The effect is warm without being precious. Materials are chosen for their provenance and performance, not for visual novelty.

A Staircase That Does More Than Connect Floors

A ceiling opening was cut to introduce a new staircase linking the two floors of the flat. Built in light pine, the stair floats against dark walls beneath a board-formed concrete ceiling, its material contrast calibrated to make the insertion clearly legible against the existing structure. The side stringer on the upper flight extends vertically to form a privacy screen, projecting into the room as what the architects describe as a "negative form." It demarcates the intimate upper-floor spaces without a door or wall.

On the lower level, the timber stair platform functions as a kind of threshold between the living room and the garden-facing glazed doors. It is a sculptural element, yes, but it earns its place by organizing circulation, daylight, and privacy in a single move.

Regional Materials as Quiet Infrastructure

The floor structure uses glass gravel and hemp clay fill sourced from Hanffaser Uckermark in Prenzlau, a regional supplier. This combination eliminates the need for waterproof membranes entirely, a significant simplification of the building's environmental footprint. CLT panels were supplied by FHS Holzbau in Grassau. These are not exotic materials; they are regional, sensible, and suited to the building's existing thermal and structural behavior.

By grounding the renovation in local supply chains and traditional Mark Brandenburg building culture, the project avoids the performative sustainability that often accompanies high-profile adaptive reuse. The hemp clay, the reclaimed bricks, the salvaged parquet: none of these choices are flashy, but together they form a coherent material argument for working with what a region already produces.

Why This Project Matters

The House for a Goldsmith pushes back against the instinct to treat every old building as raw material for a pristine contemporary interior. Christoph Wagner and Wenke Schladitz demonstrate that understanding a building's accumulated history is not sentimentality but a design methodology. Their selective interventions, the round window, the staircase, the garden reorientation, are precise enough to register as architecture without overwriting the structure's own biography.

More broadly, the project offers a model for low-intervention renovation that is replicable across the thousands of underused agricultural buildings scattered through Brandenburg and similar post-agricultural landscapes. It does not require heroic budgets or exotic technology. It requires attentiveness, material literacy, and the confidence to leave things alone when leaving them alone is the better decision. For a goldsmith who works at the scale of millimeters, the architects have found a fittingly precise register for working at the scale of a house.

House for a Goldsmith, designed by Christoph Wagner and Wenke Schladitz. Lanke, Mark Brandenburg, Germany. 380 m². Completed 2023. Photography by Eric Tschernow.

About the Studio

Wenke Schladitz

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