Seeland, a remote German village in a damp and blustery part of the formerly communist East, seemed an unlikely place for a weekend getaway to cosmopolitan Berliner Elena Stein. And she still marvels that the tiny hamlet turned out to be a place where she’d buy a dark and ramshackle 19th-century farmhouse and remake it into an airy family retreat equipped with state-of-the-art sustainable heating and power systems.

Hoff says she and Cobb saved about 40 to 50 percent of the house’s existing elements—notably the original brick facade, which now contrasts with new solar roof tiles from Solteq." layout="wide" credit="Photo by Eriver Hijano" photoUserId=""/>

Three decades after German reunification, this sparsely populated rural area in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern can feel out of the way and frozen in time. But for Stein, her husband, Roland, and their teenage children, Alicia, David, and Frederik, this land of storks and cranes and water and wind has become special to them precisely because it is so unlike anywhere else. As Alicia says, “It’s like being on another planet.”

“Sustainability is often used as a big banner. On this traditional house, we wanted the aesthetic to be subtle but the performance to be loud,” explains architect Christine Lara Hoff. The team incorporated heated concrete floors and other new features, such as the steel stairs. " layout="wide" credit="Add credit" photoUserId=""/>

The Seeland house is a nearly three-hour car ride from the family’s apartment in Berlin, where Elena, a Russian-born sociologist who grew up in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), leads the Center for Independent Social Research, a nonprofit focused on building civil communities and discourse in post-Soviet societies. Roland is a trade and public procurement lawyer advising multinational corporations.

They first came to the area in late 2013 when a Berlin neighbor invited them to her cottage for an apple-picking weekend. They wondered how she could have a house in such a strange, rustic place with so few amenities. At that time, drinking water needed to be carted in.

The “village” of Seeland comprises just eight houses on a short, dead-end dirt track, miles of rolling beet fields from even a secondary road. But it was quiet, with a starry night sky undiluted by artificial light, and the family slowly felt a sense of time stretching out.

“After two days, it felt like we’d been here for a week, and we liked it,” Elena recalls, looking onto the garden of the house they discovered that weekend. Roland noticed a hand-painted for sale sign with a phone number posted a few doors down from their friend’s place. Back in Berlin, he called the sellers, an older couple who, after decades here, were more than ready to let go of their dacha.

After the Steins bought the house the next year, Elena was shocked to find that the previous occupants left everything—dishes, furniture, a refrigerator full of food, even underwear in the drawers. Water from an outdoor pump was orange.

“But the garden was nice, and there was still the feeling of it being a very special place,” Elena says. Undeterred, they cleaned almost everything out and began spending weekends and summer holidays there. The family—as well as friends visiting from Barcelona and the South of France—didn’t mind bringing their own water and essentially camping indoors. But by 2017, the house was showing more wear and tear, so they decided to renovate.

Roland’s chance conversation with a former colleague led to a meeting in a Berlin tapas bar with architects Sierra Boaz Cobb and Christine Lara Hoff. The two were Yale classmates and briefly worked at the same firm, and were excited to collaborate on the Stein house.

“There’s an adventurous spirit to them, and I really like that,” Hoff says of the Steins. “We had never done a house. They took a chance with us.” Work began in 2018 and was completed in December 2020. For the resulting 1,720-square-foot house, Hoff and Cobb were careful to restore and preserve many of the existing 19th-century elements.

“Roland and I wanted to save the original parts of the house, but if we couldn’t, we would build new,” Elena explains. “We did not want an imitation of an old house.” Among the revelations uncovered throughout the renovation was the original brick exterior, which was concealed during the postwar German Democratic Republic years by what Cobb describes as “a strange mixture of concrete,” typical of the ad hoc methods used then, when resources were scarce.

“We spent nearly five years here without renovating. I think it was the right decision. I believe in developing your own history with a place.”

—Elena Stein, resident

Local carpenters, masons, and tile workers still use some old-school techniques and tools from that time and long before. The roads to the site don’t accommodate heavy equipment, so workers built robust interior scaffolding to hold up the roof while they dug out and relaid the foundation and devised a pulley system to hoist the new beams into place.

Traditional methods and materials complement the clients’ sustainability goals. The clay ceiling is insulated with hay. A central beam too damaged to use was replaced by one recycled from an old school nearby.

The roof is a checkered pattern of standard concrete and photovoltaic shingles, which provide less power than a standard large, elevated solar panel setup but keep the roof looking familiar and are more than adequate to light the home. Any excess wattage is fed back into the grid.

That credit helps balance out the power used in the winter by the geothermal heating system, which has an Ochsner pump that sends fluid 430 feet deep into clay soil beneath the garden before circulating the heated liquid through an exchanger that feeds into the house, warming the finished concrete flooring.

On the ground level, this system is supplemented by heat from a fireplace, which warms the open living and dining spaces, plus the light-filled, double-height kitchen, where a tall vertical window looks out at a magnolia tree. The dining table is near what Elena calls the television—an 11-by-5.5-foot horizontal window with views of the back deck and the yard’s walnut, cherry, and apple trees, as well as the occasional deer and hawk.

The Steins wanted the street-facing exterior to match neighboring houses. “It should be organic,” says Elena, while on the private side they felt “free to do what we like” and have expansive windows with garden views." layout="wide" credit="Photo by Eriver Hijano" photoUserId=""/>

The Steins did not fill the house with new, brand-name furnishings, but rather with mixed and matched eclectic finds. The centerpiece of the kitchen is a massive chandelier with inverted clear bottles that help scatter the light. In her bedroom, Elena points out a green-shaded desk lamp that reminds her of the reading room in the national library in St. Petersburg; it sits alongside a book of poems by Russian Symbolist writer Aleksandr Blok. A colorful knit throw from Brazil—courtesy of Roland, who grew up in São Paulo—brings a touch of Tropicália to the chilly north.

the brick, custom gray shutters and wood window frames from FritzGlock are also in keeping with the vernacular, but their undulating geometry “subtly hints at the modernity of the interior,” says Hoff. The home’s lighting is powered by Solteq photovoltaic shingles interspersed with concrete tiles, creating a shimmering pattern reminiscent of slate roofs common to the region." layout="bleed" credit="Photo by Eriver Hijano" photoUserId=""/>

The house now has potable water, among other exciting modern conveniences, but the road is still muddy, and there’s no broadband. “You can’t call anybody from here,” daughter Alicia says, unfazed. “Your head cools off when you’re here. And that’s the thing people like the most when they visit.”

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Hoff Architects / @hoffarchitects and Sierra Boaz Cobb

Structural Engineering: Ingenieurbonüro Pries

Cabinetry Design: Tischlerei Sander, Dipl.-Ing Lars Bühring, and Peter Bongardt Holzbau

—

Head back to the March/April 2022 issue homepage