The first apartments will be delivered early next month, the last ones will be ready at the beginning of December. But living there immediately is not possible yet. “The buyers will first have to completely prepare their apartments with kitchens and sanitary facilities. Because we deliver the homes in a shell, with electricity, heat recovery ventilation, plastered ceilings and walls, and with underfloor heating. The design is up to them.”
Two apartments in the Blue Pavilion are still for sale. Costs for both: no less than 695,000 euros each. But then you have a living space of around 170 square meters, two bathrooms and two bedrooms, and with a bit of luck also a balcony. Prices in the spacious residential complex vary between 4.5 and 8 tons. “And two apartments have their own elevator, which cost 7.5 tons. The rest use the elevator in the central hall.”
Van Bree realizes that these are ‘hefty prices’. “But then you live uniquely, on an estate, among the greenery. And even though it is an old national monument, almost all houses have label A in terms of energy consumption.”
However, there is a downside. The nineteen apartments in the national monument are simply connected to the gas network, while the six new patio homes are self-sufficient with solar panels and a heat pump. “We have a collective energy system in the monumental building, but unfortunately it runs on gas. We wanted solar panels on the roof. But the monument committee rejected that. Those solar panels could be seen from the edge of the roof, and they didn’t want that. Well, in all You have to deal with things like that.”
All in all, the ‘challenging’ project has been delayed by almost a year. By the way, not just because of construction technical malaise. There were also the bats, which lived in the monument for years, and which, according to nature legislation, had to be given an alternative before even one wall was demolished. Bat boxes were installed everywhere on the front and side walls. But those on the facade are all gone again.
“We went to check them recently, because we had to work on the facade and had to remove the cupboards. But as it turned out, according to the biologist, they were not inhabited and had never been. So we did not put the cupboards back. Where Did the bats from the cavity walls actually go there? I have no idea, they didn’t leave a moving notice. But we also created a bat hotel in our tower. Maybe they are all there.”