S House Bydgoszcz

S House Bydgoszcz takes a 1975 prefabricated concrete workers' hotel on ul. Jana Karola Chodkiewicza, 4,898.5 square metres of it, and turns it into a private student dormitory with commercial space at street level. The building housed industrial workers first and SGB Bank later, and eight storeys of that had to be rethought from the inside out. It now holds 108 student apartments in three types, Standard, Balcony and Mezzanine, plus six commercial units on the ground floor: a 255 square metre gym, a 150 square metre escape room, a restaurant and a Zabka. It opened in June 2024 as Central Campus Living, developed by Apartas. It is also the first project where Rise.Design formally delegated project management to someone else.

We called it urban acupuncture internally. One building, one intervention, and the area around it changes because the programme and the identity change. The location made the argument for us. Kazimierz Wielki University, the Collegium Medicum of Nicolaus Copernicus University and the Feliks Nowowiejski Academy of Music are all walking distance, and the tram stops at the door. The market analysis in November 2020, before design started, confirmed demand across all three apartment types. The 320 square metre terrace on the first floor, a gym and sauna open around the clock, and the shared spaces in the basement all point the same way: what a student is renting here is the building, not the room.

The 1975 prefabricated exterior was past saving, so it came off and a Cembrit fibre-cement ventilated panel system went on. The new geometry removes the Soviet-era read entirely while the massing, the window rhythm and the structural grid underneath stay exactly as they were. Three cost versions of the facade were drawn, so the specification could move with the budget without the design changing. On a street where the tram stops outside, the ground floor has to give something back. It does: cafe terracing, branded storefronts and pedestrian entrances wrapped around the base.

Each apartment type got two interior options inside the same 20 to 25 square metre footprint. Option 1 is industrial-residential: Crittall steel-glass partitions between sleeping and living, a herringbone wood headboard on the bed wall, grey fluted kitchen cabinetry doing the storage. Option 2 is warmer and closer to a boutique hotel. Sage green fluted slat walls are its signature and they turn up everywhere, on the headboard, the kitchen peninsula, the room divider and the desk partition, so the whole apartment reads as one thing. That sage carries out of the apartments into the corridor plaster and the lobby walls, which ties the building together.

The lobby and corridors give all seven residential floors a common identity. Three-dimensional SHouse lettering on a sage green wall, pine panel cladding, concrete floors, and heavy black door numbers on oak veneer, so you always know where you are. The original 1975 terrazzo mosaic floor stayed in the lobby. That pattern is late Soviet institutional interior, exactly the thing most conversions rip out, and keeping it means the building still admits where it came from.

Both options use prefabricated bathroom pods, 108 of them for 108 apartments. In a building that was itself prefabricated, that keeps the quality even and the installation fast. Option 1 bathrooms are white hexagonal tile, LED-backlit rectangular mirrors, floating oak vanities. Option 2 takes the sage green in with it, on a fluted accent panel with an oval mirror, so even the smallest room in the flat belongs to the same scheme.

At 27.46 metres the building is classified high-rise, W category, which brings fire safety and acoustic standards that a prefabricated concrete shell was never built to meet. Meeting them inside the existing structure is where the engineering got hard. The documentation runs to 783 files across 127 directories. Fifty years ago this building housed workers. It houses students now, which is the same job done for a different city.