Apartamenty nad Stawami in Błonie, phases I and II

Mazdom planned premium apartments in Błonie, facing the town's Glinianki ponds, with an underground car park and ground-floor commercial units. The Apartamenty nad Stawami site had a high groundwater table, and this affected both phases of the development. Every time a garage goes below the water table, the foundation slab has to be thicker, and excavation, dewatering and spoil removal all cost more.

PAKA.archi set the height of the underground garages at Apartamenty nad Stawami I and II so that, apart from local pits, they stayed above the groundwater table. By PAKA.archi's estimate, a thicker foundation slab at Apartamenty nad Stawami could have raised its cost by 25–50%. The first phase, Apartamenty nad Stawami I, was completed in August 2020.

After the first phase, Mazdom commissioned PAKA.archi to design the second as a separate project. The local zoning plan designated the Apartamenty nad Stawami II site for single-family houses and services, so building apartment blocks would have required a change to the plan, which would have taken about 2 years with no certainty of the outcome.

Instead of a plan change, PAKA.archi took the second phase through Poland's special housing act, known as 'lex developer', which allows a municipal council to approve a housing development on land the zoning plan designates for another use. PAKA.archi prepared the application, the concept design and the required documents, and handled discussions with the municipal office. Błonie Town Council passed its resolution on Apartamenty nad Stawami II about 3 months after the application was submitted.

On its own initiative, PAKA.archi proposed apartments with mezzanines on the top floors of Apartamenty nad Stawami II: 8 in building A and 12 in building B. The mezzanines added 172 m² of NSA to building A and 276 m² to building B, 448 m² in total, without changing the buildings' massing. Those 448 m² represent about 7.6% of the NSA of the second phase of Apartamenty nad Stawami.

During the design of Apartamenty nad Stawami II, it emerged that the stormwater sewer, which also drains the access road, had to run across municipal plots, State Treasury plots and a plot with an unresolved legal status and no owner. Any other route would have been much longer, and ground conditions and lack of space ruled out on-site soakaways.

PAKA.archi used a rarely applied procedure under Article 124a of the Polish Real Estate Management Act, which allows the county authority to issue a decision permitting infrastructure to cross a property with an unresolved legal status. The Head of West Warsaw County issued the decision for Apartamenty nad Stawami II 7 months after the application was submitted, and the programme for the second phase did not slip.

Apartamenty nad Stawami I is a four-storey building with 81 apartments, an underground car park for 61 cars and a green courtyard, right next to the ponds, with private gardens and terraces on the ground floor and large loggias on the upper floors. Apartamenty nad Stawami II consists of two buildings with 120 apartments of 32 to 106 m² and 9 ground-floor commercial units, completed in May 2023 (building B) and January 2024 (building A). Every apartment at Apartamenty nad Stawami II has one or two balconies, and the partition walls can be removed to change the layout. Both phases share modern, minimalist architecture with white and grey façades, large areas of glazing and glass balcony balustrades.

Thanks to the mezzanines, Mazdom had 448 m² more to sell in the same buildings of Apartamenty nad Stawami II. The special housing act and the county decision allowed the second phase of Apartamenty nad Stawami to be built without waiting about 2 years for a plan change and without delaying the programme, and the garages of both phases, designed above the groundwater table, needed no thicker foundation slab and added nothing to the construction cost.

The same core PAKA.archi team led the design of both phases, with three more people joining for the second, larger phase, so what was learned about the ground and the location at Apartamenty nad Stawami I carried straight over to the second phase.