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Architecture, Residential Architecture

Residential and Studio House Lechner by Lechner and Lechner Architects in Salzburg, Austria

August 18, 2026

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esidential & Studio House Lechner inserts a mixed-use dwelling and workplace into Salzburg’s historic center, using a compact vertical organization, planted terraces, and water to reframe dense urban living around privacy, work, and direct contact with the outdoors.

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Residential & Studio House Lechner Technical Information

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• Architects: Lechner & Lechner Architects

• Location: Historic Center of Salzburg, Austria

• Gross Area: 300 m2 | 3,229 Sq. Ft.

• Project Years: 1990 – 2010

• Photographs: © Julian Höck

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"Rather than separating living, working and recreation into different parts of the city, these functions are brought together within a single building."  – Lechner & Lechner Architects

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Infill Architecture Within Salzburg’s Historic Fabric

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Set on a plot of approximately 130 square meters in Salzburg’s protected historic center, Residential & Studio House Lechner works through the tensions of urban infill rather than attempting to neutralize them. The narrow parcel is surrounded by older buildings of differing scale, construction, and formal language. Its response is a compact lime-white rendered volume that maintains the street line while registering its own contemporary construction through planar surfaces, sharp openings, and a measured sequence of setbacks.

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The facade avoids stylistically reproducing adjacent baroque and vernacular buildings. Flush window openings, dark bronze-brown frames, and the corner glazing at the upper level establish a distinct tectonic order, while the white render retains a material association with the mineral surfaces of Salzburg’s historic fabric. Reflections in the corner window bring the opposite roofscape into the elevation, making the existing city a changing visual component of the new envelope rather than a distant context.

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At ground level, the building becomes more directly involved with the lane. A glazed studio frontage sits behind coarse exposed-aggregate concrete piers, creating a deliberately rough base beneath the smoother rendered upper volume. Planting spills from the terrace edge above the glazing, softening the boundary between domestic occupation and public pavement. The studio’s visibility, together with the everyday activity of the street, allows the building to operate as part of the fine-grained social life of the old town rather than as a sealed private residence.

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Vertical Mixed Use and the Public to Private Gradient

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The project is organized as a vertical mixed-use section. The architecture studio occupies the ground floor, while the domestic program rises above it through progressively more private levels. This arrangement treats the building less as a detached house transferred into the city than as a contemporary townhouse, where work, residence, and leisure occupy adjacent strata. The public face remains at street level, while the upper floors withdraw into a landscape of terraces, planting, and framed views.

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The studio originated in the 1990s conversion of a former motorcycle workshop. The studio retained its existing industrial character by preserving steel beams, thick masonry walls, arched niches, and large steel-framed glazing. Rather than concealing these elements beneath a domestic finish, the intervention edited the shell with worktables, shelves, and suspended plan cabinets. Hung from the original steel structure, these cabinets can slide to partition the room, support drawings and models, or clear the floor for meetings and events.

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This adaptable interior gives the studio a degree of spatial indeterminacy that is unusual within the tightly constrained plot. It also establishes a useful contrast with the more calibrated domestic spaces above. The ground floor remains open to visual exchange with the street, while ascending through the building corresponds to a gradual reduction in public exposure. The sectional sequence makes privacy an architectural condition produced by height, planting, and controlled apertures, rather than simply by separation from the city.

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Garden, Water, and Domestic Exterior Space in Dense Urban Conditions

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"The roof garden is the project’s principal spatial instrument. Instead of converting all available volume into enclosed accommodation, the design gives a substantial portion of the site to terraces, planting beds, water channels, and a small pool. This decision is significant in a historic centre where outdoor space is often limited to courtyards, narrow balconies, or distant public parks. Here, exterior space is not supplementary to the dwelling but becomes a room within its daily organisation.."  – Lechner & Lechner Architects

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On the main living level, full-height sliding glazing opens several sides of the interior to the terrace. Perimeter circulation allows occupants to move around the house, loosening the conventional distinction between facade and boundary wall. A long reflecting channel runs beside the glazing at floor level, carrying light and reflection into the living space. The resulting condition resembles a winter garden, though it is less an enclosed conservatory than a shifting threshold between kitchen, dining space, terrace, water, and sky.​

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Vegetation performs several functions at once. Espaliered fruit trees, climbing wisteria, roses, ornamental grasses, and low perennial planting establish visual screening against close neighboring facades while preserving selective long views across the old town. Seasonal growth changes the terrace’s density, shade, and color over time. Details such as roots suspended in a shallow water basin and a bird’s nest within facade vegetation suggest that the planting is more than ornamental cover. It creates a limited but tangible habitat within a highly built environment.

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Material Continuity and Environmental Systems

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A restrained palette gives the building continuity across its studio, domestic, and exterior spaces. Lime-based render relates the new volume to Salzburg’s long tradition of mineral plaster facades, while avoiding historical pastiche. At ground floor level, exposed aggregate concrete provides a heavier, more tactile register. Dark steel frames, balustrades, and structural elements introduce a precise industrial note that continues the retained workshop below, while stainless steel, oak, pale cast floors, and clear glazing articulate the domestic interiors.

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Within the narrow plan, reflective and transparent surfaces are used as spatial tools rather than applied decoration. Mirrored kitchen walls multiply views of vegetation and daylight, visually extending the room’s depth. Sliding glazing connects interior circulation to the terrace, while selected windows frame neighboring baroque facades, rooflines, and the distant Hohensalzburg Fortress. These devices do not erase the setting’s density. Instead, they make the proximity of surrounding buildings part of the inhabitation experience.

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The environmental strategy is integrated into this compact urban model. Approximately 35 square meters of photovoltaic panels contribute to on-site electricity generation, while a ground-source heat pump connected to deep geothermal boreholes provides heating. Controlled mechanical ventilation with heat recovery reduces demand while supporting a building whose living spaces are closely associated with large areas of glazing. Together with roof-level planting and retention of the former workshop structure, these systems position the project as an argument for adapting dense historic areas through operational and spatial measures.

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About Lechner & Lechner

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Lechner & Lechner Architects is a Salzburg-based practice run by Christine Lechner and Horst Lechner. The office is on the ground floor of Residential & Studio House Lechner, a former motorcycle workshop the couple converted in the 1990s. For this project, the practice brings work, living, recreation, planting, and environmental systems together in a compact vertical interpretation of the European townhouse.

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