A 19th-Century Farmhouse in Eastern Germany Gets New Tricks With an Ecologically Minded Update

Located in an outlying village three hours north of Berlin, the remote property—which until recently lacked potable water—was transformed by architects Sierra Boaz Cobb and Christine Lara Hoff into an energy-efficient, 21st-century retreat.

Mar 15, 2022 - 01:17

A 19th-Century Farmhouse in Eastern Germany Gets New Tricks With an Ecologically Minded Update

Located in an outlying village three hours north of Berlin, the remote property—which until recently lacked potable water—was transformed by architects Sierra Boaz Cobb and Christine Lara Hoff into an energy-efficient, 21st-century retreat.

Elena Stein in the kitchen of the weekend cottage she shares with her husband, Roland, their three teenage children, and the family dachshund, Lucy, in the quiet hamlet of Seeland, three hours north of Berlin.

Seeland, a remote German village in a damp and blustery part of the formerly communist East, seemed an unlikely place for a weekend getaway to cosmopolitan Berliner Elena Stein. And she still marvels that the tiny hamlet turned out to be a place where she’d buy a dark and ramshackle 19th-century farmhouse and remake it into an airy family retreat equipped with state-of-the-art sustainable heating and power systems.

Built as a farmhouse in the 19th century, then used as a dacha in the Cold War era, the structure was most recently transformed by architects Sierra Boaz Cobb and Christine Lara Hoff. <span style="font-family: Theinhardt, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;">Hoff says she and Cobb saved about 40 to 50 percent of the house’s existing elements—notably the original brick facade, which now contrasts with new solar roof tiles from Solteq.</span> — Built as a farmhouse in the 19th century, then used as a dacha in the Cold War era, the structure was most recently transformed by architects Sierra Boaz Cobb and Christine Lara Hoff. Hoff says she and Cobb saved about 40 to 50 percent of the house’s existing elements—notably the original brick facade, which now contrasts with new solar roof tiles from Solteq.
Photo by Eriver Hijano

Three decades after German reunification, this sparsely populated rural area in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern can feel out of the way and frozen in time. But for Stein, her husband, Roland, and their teenage children, Alicia, David, and Frederik, this land of storks and cranes and water and wind has become special to them precisely because it is so unlike anywhere else. As Alicia says, "It’s like being on another planet."

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The Seeland house is a nearly three-hour car ride from the family’s apartment in Berlin, where Elena, a Russian-born sociologist who grew up in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), leads the Center for Independent Social Research, a nonprofit focused on building civil communities and discourse in post-Soviet societies. Roland is a trade and public procurement lawyer advising multinational corporations.

They first came to the area in late 2013 when a Berlin neighbor invited them to her cottage for an apple-picking weekend. They wondered how she could have a house in such a strange, rustic place with so few amenities. At that time, drinking water needed to be carted in.

The "village" of Seeland comprises just eight houses on a short, dead-end dirt track, miles of rolling beet fields from even a secondary road. But it was quiet, with a starry night sky undiluted by artificial light, and the family slowly felt a sense of time stretching out.