Residence «Zum Goldenen Löwen»

Attractive residence in Basel’s historical city

This residential project at a historically important inner city site was triggered by the relocation of one of the three personnel restaurants of UBS AG in the spring of 2004 to Henric Petri-Strasse 9 (see personnel restaurant “impresso”). The properties of St. Alban-Vorstadt 36–42 are located on the Greater Basel side of the Rhine in one of the first city districts in front of the ancient city walls of Basel, which no longer exist today.

Housing project

“The Golden Lion” project comprises 17 new apartments based on a wide variety of spatial concepts in the current building volume. The project is not a conversion of historical buildings, but a new building created behind a baroque city palace façade and the façades of ancient craftsmen’s houses. The entire building installation of St. Alban-Vorstadt 36–42 was erected in 1964 by architects Suter and Suter. The underlying principle of the project is the implementation of customized building owner projects offering maximum flexibility in terms of layout and furnishings of the flats within the framework provided by the current cubature and structure of the historical façade.

Living “Grand Espace“

The name of this utilization variant provides an apt description of the core quality of the flats: The apartments offered are of above-average, very generous size. The layout of the flats takes advantage of the fact that the protected historical façade hides the worthless substance of the building of 1964, which it is possible to replace by a sophisticated, intertwined residential structure. The residential rooms – with different heights up to 3.60 meters along the baroque façade of the “Golden Lion” and the neighboring buildings of St. Alban-Vorstadt 36, 40, 42 – evolve beyond the historical building partitions into individual flat ground plans. The room heights of the building sections enveloping the inner courtyard are reduced to 2.60 meters’ clearance in favor of a larger number of rooms. In contrast to the historical room structure facing St. Alban-Vorstadt, they are given a modern, light-flooded architectural aspect which delimits the new building section from the sections converted.

Interior standard

The interior standard satisfies the most rigorous needs. It is individually defined according to the owners’ concepts, giving consideration to the ideas and wishes of the future inhabitants.

History

The house named “The Golden Lion” (Haus zum Goldenen Löwen) – was built in 1739 by the merchants Abraham and Franz Legrand on Aeschenvorstadt 4. They also lived in the building. As the name suggests, the site was formerly occupied by an inn – one of the many on Aeschenvorstadt at that time. Erecting a building must have been quite an event in that age, for the contrast with the Gothic burgher houses was enormous. In its proportions and lines, the unknown architect took his own personal approach. The characteristic feature of the overall layout was the “honor court” (Ehrenhof), which did not face the street, but the inner courtyard. The design of the façade was just as idiosyncratic, since unlike typical baroque buildings, the emphasis was not on the centre of the building but its two ends. Aeschenvorstadt was to obtain its new face by the correction plan of 1949. This sealed the fate of the “Golden Lion”. The house was to be demolished to provide space for the new “Handwerkerbank” – the tradesmen’s bank – on a recessed building line. Under the supervision of the authorities, the hewn stones of the façade as well as the specially designed interior parts were dismantled in 1957 and warehoused. The idea was to re-erect the “Golden Lion” at a different site. The ideal site was found in 1960 on St. Alban-Vorstadt opposite the fountain and the road fork leading to the “Mühlenberg”, where the line of houses next to the “Wildensteinerhof” was interrupted.