Jan Řežáb's Prague wooden house will generate its own energy

The owner of developer JRD, Jan Řežáb, has unveiled a new project — the EcoCare Residence housing complex near the Prague-Holetovice train station, which will be able to cover up to two-thirds of its own energy needs. Construction will cost around a quarter of a billion crowns, with completion planned for autumn 2028.

Řežáb is known for working in renewable energy and ecological waste processing alongside housing construction, and the new project reflects that approach. The four-storey timber building, with 30 apartments, will have solar panels and wind turbines on its roof, and the electricity generated will be stored in a central 160-kilowatt-hour battery and distributed among the apartments.

Five geothermal boreholes up to 200 metres deep are planned beneath the building; together with heat pumps, they will provide heating and cooling through pipework in the ceiling suspensions. Automatic external blinds will protect the building from overheating.

Particular attention has been paid to water: greywater from showers, baths, sinks and washing machines will be treated in a root-zone treatment system and returned to the building for flushing toilets and irrigation. As a result, the building will use 40% less drinking water than a typical residential building. Rainwater will be retained and absorbed on site, feeding a nearby stream, and part of the roof will be planted with vegetation.

“Before we started designing, we looked to see whether a similar housing project already existed anywhere in the world. The individual technologies exist on their own, but we couldn't find a project that combined them into a single managed system while still remaining an ordinary house, where someone simply buys an apartment,” says Řežáb.

Apartments ranging from studios to 4+kk units will go on sale in early September, priced from 6 to 16.5 million crowns. Construction will begin next spring. “Thanks to the experience we've built up over three decades and our established relationships with suppliers, new technologies make economic sense for us,” explains JRD representative Anna Houdková.

Some of the three-room apartments will get a so-called “growing” layout: one room will be designed from the start with two doors and several windows so that it can later be divided into two with furniture or a partition. The project also includes restoring the adjacent park and measures to support local biodiversity — work carried out by biologists and landscape architects, alongside an ornithological survey of local bird species.