S House Bydgoszcz

S House Bydgoszcz is a 4,898.5 square metre adaptive reuse project transforming a 1975 prefabricated reinforced concrete workers' hotel on ul. Jana Karola Chodkiewicza into a modern mixed-use private student dormitory. Originally constructed as a hotel for industrial workers and later operating as SGB Bank, the eight-storey structure required complete architectural rethinking to function as contemporary student housing. The programme delivers 108 student apartments across three typologies — Standard, Balcony, and Mezzanine — alongside six commercial ground-floor units including a 255 square metre gym, 150 square metre escape room, a restaurant, and a Zabka convenience store. Completed in June 2024 as "Central Campus Living" by developer Apartas, the project represents the first formal delegation of project management in Rise.Design's history.

The design philosophy framing the project was described internally as "urban acupuncture" — a targeted intervention at a single existing building that, by changing its programme and identity, activates a wider urban ecology. The site's location within walking distance of Kazimierz Wielki University, the Collegium Medicum of Nicolaus Copernicus University, and the Feliks Nowowiejski Academy of Music, with tram connections at the building's entrance providing direct access to the city centre, made the student housing conversion strategically obvious. The market analysis completed in November 2020 before the design phase began confirmed strong demand across all three apartment typologies. A 320 square metre terrace on the first floor, the gym and sauna accessible around the clock, and the shared amenity programme in the basement were designed to support a co-living model where the building itself — not just the apartment — is the product.

The facade strategy replaces the deteriorated 1975 prefabricated exterior with a Cembrit fibre-cement ventilated panel system, its contemporary geometry erasing the building's Soviet-era origins while the massing, window rhythm, and structural grid of the original shell are retained beneath. Three cost options for the facade system were developed, ensuring the technical specification could be calibrated to investment parameters without compromising the design outcome. The building's tram-adjacent position on Chodkiewicza demands a street-level composition that activates the public realm — the commercial ground floor wraps the base with cafe terracing, branded storefronts, and pedestrian entry points that animate the streetscape rather than turning away from it.

Two interior design options were developed for each apartment type, offering distinct aesthetic identities within a shared structural footprint of approximately 20 to 25 square metres. Option 1 employs an industrial-residential vocabulary: Crittall steel-glass partitions divide sleeping from living zones, a herringbone wood headboard panel anchors the bed wall, and grey fluted kitchen cabinetry provides storage within a compact open plan. Option 2 commits to a warmer, more boutique-hotel register — sage green fluted slat walls serve as the design signature, appearing on the headboard panel, kitchen peninsula, room divider, and desk partition to create a unified spatial identity across all zones of the apartment. The sage green palette extends from the apartment interiors into the common areas, where it becomes the colour of the corridor plaster and lobby walls, creating a building-wide material thread.

The lobby and corridor system establishes the common area identity that unifies all seven residential floors. SHouse three-dimensional branded lettering on a sage green wall, pine wood panel cladding, concrete floor finishes, and bold black apartment door numbering on oak veneer panels create a legible wayfinding hierarchy. The choice to preserve the original 1975 terrazzo mosaic floor in the lobby — a pattern typical of late Soviet institutional interiors — transforms a heritage constraint into a design feature, acknowledging the building's history while situating it within a contemporary adaptive reuse narrative.

The bathroom specification across both apartment options employs prefabricated bathroom pods — 108 units installed within the 108 apartments — enabling consistent quality control and accelerated installation within the prefabricated concrete building's module. Option 1 bathrooms feature white hexagonal wall tiles, LED-backlit rectangular mirrors, and floating oak vanity units. Option 2 carries the sage green identity into the wet room through a fluted accent wall panel and oval mirror, maintaining the apartment's design language through to the smallest enclosed space.

The building's high-rise classification (W category, 27.46 metres) required compliance with specific fire safety and acoustic performance standards within the prefabricated concrete shell, adding engineering complexity to the adaptive reuse beyond typical residential renovation scope. With 783 project files across 127 directories, the documentation package reflects a project of genuine institutional scale — a student housing complex that began as a workers' accommodation half a century earlier and returned to that social mission, reshaped for a contemporary urban campus programme.