They have an air of elegance and eccentricity, tastefulness and trepidation and are famous not least for their role in literature: townhouses, the terraced urban residences of the landed aristocracy, are considered the epitome of British lifestyle. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels Sherlock Holmes visited modest city mansions as the scenes of mysterious murders. This is where Dracula hid and Francis Bacon painted his agonizing pictures. Whether white or brick-red, Victorian or Classical, the dignified exterior of British affluence supplies the desired architectural facade of anglophiles everywhere.
In recent years, however, the term has lost its customary associations in Germany and become a real-estate anglicism centred in Berlin, where the word “Townhouse” describes a new concept of inner city housing that is enjoying steadily increasing success. The idea was initiated by urban planners working on behalf of the Berlin Senate: small-scale building projects on unused plots of land in the city centre are intended to prevent the monotony that is often created by large blocks on expensive sites. At the same time the city hopes that these luxurious houses will stop the flight of prosperous taxpayers who would otherwise move to the surrounding countryside. It was decided to offer attractive building plots in the inner city for a target group including successful entrepreneurs and wealthy families so that they could realize their own residential ideas.
In 2004 the Berlin Senate offered a large area of land for sale to build “townhouses” just a stone’s throw from the Cathedral and Schlossplatz. Although the term had hardly been used in Germany before, it was meant to lend this experiment in private residential architecture a more exclusive air. The framework conditions underlying the project also ensured that no one could associate these new buildings with the small uniform suburban houses with pitched roofs and front gardens that are normally considered terraced houses in Germany. The 47 plots with an average width of only 6.5 metres were arranged in two large blocks immediately adjacent to the foreign ministry and each one of them could be designed and built individually. The builders were granted a great deal of freedom over their designs with just a few rules governing a common height of four to six storeys and the uniform orientation of house fronts.
When the area was completed in 2008, the project was immediately regarded a success. The rush of would-be home owners had left no gaps in the shining row of tall villas. What is more, the range of styles presented a faithful reflection of modern pluralism: from Classical to Bauhaus, from modest prewar romantic to postmodern and shrill, practically no epoch of the last 200 years was ignored. Plaster, marble, brick, glass, metal and wood were used and the colours range from egg yoke yellow and salmon pink to metallic silver and aubergine. Even leading architects like David Chipperfield and Hans Kollhoff became active townhouse pioneers and ensured that the new top addresses in the Berlin-Mitte district attract daily groups of architecture tourists. However, the image of these German buildings has little in common with the understatement of elegant British townhouses, which follow the same external design and flaunt their originality inside. Inspiration for the colourful potpourri of architectural styles in Berlin comes more from the transformation of Amsterdam’s wharf area during the mid-1990s.
The fact that the Berlin townhouses are now themselves considered paradigmatic and a mania for copying their success has broken out in the capital is not only greeted with enthusiasm in Berlin, a city known for its traditionally strong protest movements. Particularly in the once radical districts of Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Prenzlauer Berg the new and planned townhouse blocks are vilified as architectural bastions of the rich – and viewings have occasionally been disrupted by flash mobs. In the wake of the increasing gentrification of the famous districts where artists and the alternative scene once flourished, the old inhabitants feel threatened by these fashionable private residences with roof gardens and underground car parks that cost over a million euros to buy or up to 12,000 euros a month to rent. As a result of the rapidly advancing conversion of cheap blocks of old buildings into prime residential areas, a process that has been going on since the fall of the Wall, townhouses have become a new focus of hate and are sometimes targets of paint bombs.
Nevertheless, the positive idea of locating ambitious residential architecture on empty inner city spaces does not contradict these justified concerns. When it comes to maintaining a socially mixed city, close proximity between doner kebab and Donna Karan is clearly preferably to the separation of poor and rich districts. Furthermore, urban diversity is better served by small-scale building projects than large residential blocks –all the more so if architectural particularism can be restrained to just a few disparate designs. Whether this new model will ever provide a similar level of inspiration and identification as its British prototype is unlikely. To achieve that a German author would have to create a new Count Dracula in a Berlin townhouse – and that would certainly not be in keeping with this new real estate trend.////
