Point of growth

Saint Petersburg’s A-Len Architectural Bureau has a division, whose name is not exactly habitual: the architectural laboratory. This division was formed in 2009 in response to the economic crisis, which significantly reduced the pace of construction and the number of contracts. The leader of the company Sergey Oreshkin decided to use the idle period to reflect on the experience accumulated over the recent decades, find new approaches to architectural design, and come up with the workload for the large staff that he did not want to dismiss. Since only housing construction was doing relatively well, the company focused specifically on this field.
This is how the program called “A.Len Perfect Apartments” came around – a knowledge base of apartment layouts that the company has been using as the basis for all of the housing projects that it designs since 2012.

“The perfect apartments” are to be found in high-end projects, such as the housing complex “Golden City” on the wash-up land of the Vasilievsky Island, and in the regions – for example, in the housing complex “Bunin”, where the layouts could be easily adjusted to fit a sophisticated stair-like structure. The program can be adapted to various classes of housing: standard, comfort, and business, as well as to mixed typologies – a vivid example here is the “Prospect Mira” compound in Ekaterinburg.

In Soviet times, such developments were provided by design research institutes; today, these things are done by large development holdings. Architectural offices, however, rarely attempt to tackle such large-scale tasks.

Andrey Ponomarev The leader of the development division of Pervostroitel

The core of the apartment range in the “Prospect Mira” compound consists of two- and three-room apartments, rather popular with the buyers. Single-room apartments do not sell that well, but, probably, this has to do with their relatively expensive price tag. The apartments of an unusual format – for example, double-height ones, have almost been sold out, and it was them that aroused a lot of interest for the project as part of the general marketing campaign. We had a lot of requests for them. According to our observations, what is the most popular with our clients are the most functional layouts – with master bedrooms, two or more bathrooms, kitchen-living room, and storage space.

The apartments offered by A-Len are diverse and balanced enough to meet the needs of the audience. The apartments of larger formats have unique advantages: double height, panoramic glazing, and master bedrooms. These unique solutions are what makes us different from the competition and gives more possibilities to our clients.

Sergey Oreshkin, A-Len

Today, the architects of our company start their work not from a sketch or a master plan, but from taking the program, previously getting from the client a package of different tasks, one of them being the range of apartments.

This program helped us to significantly streamline the architect-developer relationship: the client, as a rule, at once accepts the layouts that we propose, which gives us an opportunity to safely work on the facades. The painfully inefficient procedure that consists of getting endless approvals from the sales department that knows very little about ergonomics, has now become pleasantly routine. When an architect works under pressure, he is very likely to deliver poor results. Today, we and developer are on the same page – they know what we are doing and they profit from getting no problem apartments. This ideology helps us sell.