Czech developer Domoplan pairs flats with home businesses

Domoplan, a Brno-based developer led by Tomáš Vavřík, has decided to try out the live-work concept on the Czech market — selling flats bundled with commercial space on the ground floor of the same building. An idea popular in New York and London will now appear in Brno too: buyers get a flat upstairs and their own studio, office or workshop below.

Twelve such units, branded Work and Live, will be part of the large Brixx project that Domoplan is building in the Starý Lískovec district. The development’s total budget is about six billion crowns, and by 2030 it is meant to include nine hundred flats, a square, a clinic and a park.

According to Vavřík, the idea grew out of watching the market: more and more entrepreneurs don’t want to rent expensive premises far from home and waste time commuting. “We want to offer a combination where downstairs you have commercial space of 25–35 square metres, and upstairs, up the stairs, your own 2+kk flat,” he explains.

There’s also a purely business logic behind the concept. The developer admits that commercial space in less lively parts of a city is harder to sell, and “livening up” the ground floor with small shops and workshops makes the space more attractive — something backed up, Vavřík notes, by urban-planning research.

There are pitfalls too: such units cannot be registered for residential use — only as non-residential space (a studio). That means VAT at the standard 21% rate instead of the reduced 12% for flats, stricter mortgage conditions, and no possibility of permanent residence registration. In exchange, the owner can write off the studio’s costs against taxes and save on rent and commuting — and that, in Vavřík’s view, is the main argument for the new model.