Lenka Milerová Turns an Old Village Pigsty into a 32-Square-Meter Concrete Summer House in Czechia

Downsizing usually means selling up and moving somewhere smaller. Mrs. F., the client behind this project in the Czech village of Panoší Újezd, did something better. She kept the smallest building on her property, a crumbling stone and brick pigsty, along with a patch of garden. She let the large family house go and asked Lenka Milerová architektka to turn the outbuilding into a summer retreat. The result has 32 square meters gross and 22 usable. It cost roughly €20,000 and was completed in 2024, three years after design began.

What makes it worth your attention is not the cute story of a pigsty becoming a cottage. It is the discipline. Milerová keeps the load-bearing shell and adds almost nothing except concrete and steel. She makes each new element carry several jobs at once. One concrete mass is a step, a woodstore, a sofa and, in its bathroom extension, a bath. Two openings are cut into the old walls. A bathroom is pushed into the slope. That is the whole project, and it is enough.

A Building That Refuses to Announce Itself

From the garden, you would struggle to call this architecture at all. The clay tile roof, rough plastered walls and overgrown shrubs read as an ordinary rural outbuilding, which is exactly what it was. The only giveaways are a skylight breaking the roof plane and a zinc-capped edge where the bathroom volume steps down.

We think this restraint is the correct call. The client chose to keep the pigsty because of a long personal connection to the site, and demolition was off the table. A conversion that shouted would have erased the thing she wanted to keep. Here, the old silhouette stays intact and the intervention happens almost entirely inside and at the thresholds.

Weathered Surfaces, Left Mostly Alone

The exterior treatment is minimal maintenance rather than restoration. The stone walls were cleaned. The brick walls received a sprayed cement coat that unifies them without pretending to be new render. Mossy stone steps, a rusted handrail and a plain grey downpipe on a trellised wall all survive as found.

The gable end shows where the new work begins. A steel-framed pivot door sits in the rough plaster without trim or flourish, opening onto a gravel path and a single pine sapling. It is a precise cut in an imprecise wall, and the contrast does the design work that decoration would otherwise attempt.

The Pivot Door as Threshold

The original pigsty was a single room, and Milerová keeps it that way. Instead of subdividing, she reworks how the room meets the outside. The glass pivot door that serves as the main entrance is set into a deep concrete reveal. Opened, it swings the room toward the spruce trees and the gravel garden.

The monolithic cast jambs are the key detail. Concrete becomes the medium for detailing, and it is used where old masonry meets new steel. That makes the thickness of the historic wall legible. Standing in the doorway, you feel how heavy the shell is, and the glass feels lighter for it.

One Window, One View

The second opening is a large, deep-set window with a steel frame from Kaltmeyer, lined in the same cast concrete. Its sill is deep enough to hold a vase of cut flowers, which tells you it was meant to be occupied, not just looked through. Beside it, the exposed rubble stone keeps the old wall honest.

The orientation of this window carries the project's emotional logic. It frames a view back to the owner's former main house. Few renovations articulate a life change this directly: you sit in the small building you kept and look at the large one you let go.

A Concrete Daybed That Does Four Jobs

The single most intelligent move is the concrete element beside the entrance. It works as a step up into the room and as a woodstore, with stacked logs filling a niche below. With linen cushions on top, it is also a daybed facing the window. Further along, the same logic continues into the bath. Furniture, storage and architecture collapse into one cast object.

On a €20,000 budget, this is not a stylistic indulgence. It is economy expressed as form. Every built-in that replaces a bought piece of furniture saves floor area in a room this tight. The stacked firewood also becomes the most textured and warmest surface in the space, a finish that costs nothing and gets used up every winter.

Bathing Inside the Slope

The bathroom is the only true addition. It is a board-formed concrete volume cut into the neighboring slope, so the building is literally pressed into its terrain. A white tub sits sunk into a plinth with stone edges. A skylight above washes the board-marked walls in soft light, and a rubble stone pier marks where the old shell ends.

Where the main room is open to the garden, the bathroom is enclosed and cave-like, lit only from above. That shift in character turns a small plan into a sequence of two distinct atmospheres. The project was reportedly exempt from thermal codes, and you can see the freedom that gave: raw concrete against earth, without layers of insulation and lining softening the experience.

Plywood as the Soft Counterpoint

Against all that concrete and stone, plywood plays the domestic role. A sliding plywood door and cabinet fronts sit above a steel sink counter on the rubble wall, forming a kitchen that is barely more than a line of joinery. In another view, a sliding panel opens onto the concrete passage toward the glowing skylight.

The material hierarchy is clear and easy to read: heavy for structure and fixed elements, light for what moves. It is a rule you could apply to almost any small renovation, and it works here because Milerová never breaks it.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan shows an irregular, angular room, with the bathroom tucked at one end and the openings along one wall. The axonometric is the most revealing drawing. It strips the project down to a concrete-toned slab, three freestanding door and window frames and the built-in tub. That is, quite literally, everything new that was built. The isometric then puts the old shell back around those frames, with a flue pipe and raised parapet edges completing the volume.

Why This Project Matters

Most adaptive reuse conversations focus on big industrial buildings: power plants, warehouses, mills. This pigsty is a reminder that the countryside is full of small agricultural structures that are too modest to protect and too meaningful to demolish. Milerová shows a repeatable method for them. Keep the shell, make a few precise cuts, cast the new parts in a single material and let built-ins replace furniture.

It also makes a quieter argument about how we live. A client chose less space on purpose and got a building that is more specific to her than the large house ever was. Construction reportedly took a long time for such a small project, and that patience shows in every jamb. For architects working with tight budgets and sentimental clients, this is a model worth studying closely.

Panoší Újezd Summer House by Lenka Milerová architektka, Panoší Újezd, Czechia. 32 m² gross floor area. Completed 2024. Photography by Radek Šrettr Úlehla.

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