International Property News

Czechs demand homes with shops, services at hand

26th February 2008

The Czechs are no longer satisfied with new comfortable flats, but they are interested only in the housing localities that also offer a variety of shops and other services, the daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) reported Tuesday.

So far unexperienced Czech developers have mostly ignored natural requirements for living - that is to combine housing with shops, restaurants, entertainment centres and other services in the same block of flats. The developers wanted to gain profit quickly so they constructed isolated flats only, HN says.

But Czech clients are more demanding now.

"It is not possible to build only flats today, as people wish to have shops and services at hand. All new projects that want to be successful must reckon with it," Vladimira Stichova, from a developer's company, told the paper.

Such multi-purpose complexes are now being built in Prague and other large Czech towns.

"The world trend is to concentrate housing and work at one and the same place. No blocks with offices that will depopulate when it turns six p.m. No cumulated terraced houses in satellite towns that are dead during the day," architect Jaroslav Safer told the paper.

He added that Czech clients, too, had started to require this lifestyle. They want to live in the areas where the baker's, hairdresser's as well as a kindergarten are round the corner.

HN writes that every settlement must have its natural centre, which can be reached by foot or possibly by bicycle, offering shops with basic goods, services as well as schools. A playground for children should be within a 150 metre distance, Safer said.

The first housing estates and satellites of family houses that were mushrooming in the 1990s lack natural centres of everyday life, and this is why their inhabitants are now leaving them and seeking to move back to town centres.

These people are typical clients of new Prague housing projects that take the new demands into consideration, a developer's company director told the paper.

Architect Vlado Milunic, co-author of the famous Dancing House in Prague that he built along with American Frank Gehry, has promoted multi-functional projects for living. He points out that bus and railway stations are ideal premises as a number of shops and services can be raised above the station buildings, HN writes.