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Source – http://www.архитект.bg

Legislatively there is no definition of the word “apartment” anywhere. For what we understand as a flat, the SPA uses the word “dwelling” and gives definition and minimum requirements.

The dwelling is: a set of premises, covered and / or open spaces, merged functionally and spatially in one unit to meet housing needs.

Here are briefly the requirements for a dwelling (apartment) deducted from the lands of the Territory Management Act and Ordinance №7:

* Have a separate entrance;
* Have at least one living room;
* Have a kitchen or kitchenette;
* Have a bathroom / WC;
* Have a storage room. It can be inside or outside the building: a basement, a ceiling or a closet;
* Not fully exposed to the northeast, northwest or north;
* The bright height of living quarters in new residential buildings should be at least 2.60 m;
* The living quarters in the roof space of residential buildings must have a clear height of at least 2,30 m in 50% of their area and at least 1,50 m in their lowest part;
* Have chimneys in living rooms and kitchens;
* Rooms and kitchens should have windows;
* The area of ​​the living room windows is at least 1/6 of the room area;
* The area of ​​bedrooms, kitchens and study windows must be at least 1/7 of the area of ​​the room;
* In the case of highlighting or under illumination in inclined panels, the size of the windows may be reduced by up to 30%;
* Not have bedrooms directly next to elevator shafts, pipelines and other premises or areas with sources of noise and vibrations greater than the limits permissible under hygiene standards;
* Entrance vestibules in the dwellings should have a minimum width of 1.3 m;
* The corridors should have a minimum width of 0.9 m;
* Be above ground.

All these requirements apply to newly designed dwellings (apartments) and must be respected if you are making a project for redevelopment and change of use of an apartment in a studio.

The studio is a non-living room and serves as an individual creative activity. Here are briefly the requirements for a studio:

The studios must have a separate bathroom. Point. There are no other requirements.

So far, it sounds logical, but it seems at first glance that you have all the premises and exhibition required for an apartment, and you have bought a workshop? Or do you have a documentary apartment, but do you wonder where your cellar disappeared?

Why do you have studios and apartments at all? In fact, every developer has always wanted more flats and fewer apartments named after ateliers, but a number of norms have limited that. Here are the practical reasons:

Parking spaces

This is the main reason for having many ateliers. There are requirements for the necessary number of parking spaces for apartment blocks: 1 number of dwelling and 10% additional number of visitors. There are no requirements for parking places for a studio. Later, the MRDPW was also aware of a letter from the end of 2006. Began to require one parking space for a studio.

This is not a requirement to have a private garage or parking space as an appendage to the apartment, and a general requirement to provide the necessary number of parking spaces for the block of flats within the plot. Whether garages on the ground floor, garages or parking lots in an underground car park, outdoor parking lot in the plot or a combination is a matter of concrete solution for each building. The architectural project must be proven to be secured in order to obtain a building permit. Of course, every developer wants more square meters for sale and less yard or expensive underground construction. Thus, the apartments for which parking spaces can not be secured become workshops on the project. And in the boom of construction, everything was being bought. Workshop or apartment, no big difference was said by most builders and brokers if a client was curious.

This is the main reason for pretty good apartments to keep records on a workshop. This is also one of the main reasons for parking on sidewalks, green (muddy) areas and lack of parking places even in completely new neighborhoods.

The struggle for more square meters for sale has led to vicious practices even if there are huge buildings without a single parking space. For example, in Bansko, not without the help of the administration, most of the new buildings were granted a building permit, applying a parking contract with some empty adjacent plot. The next year and the empty parking lot was being built and a parking contract with some empty adjacent plot. The next year and the empty parking lot aged.

Warehouse

Every apartment (apartment) must have a warehouse. This may be a basement, attic or closet in the dwelling itself. These areas were also not liked by entrepreneurs. More expensive residential areas are sold than storage areas. In the basements are built the necessary underground parking lots and if there is a place were designed and basements, but rarely reached for all apartments (dwellings). So part of them again became workshops.

Bearing in mind that among the norms and requirements of the entrepreneurs there are no warehouses, the architects invented a wardrobe-niche-warehouse! If you have an apartment on paper, but you are wondering why you do not have a basement, a ceiling or a closet – that’s because the built-in wardrobe you have in the hallway, however small, actually is called a warehouse.

World directions

It is not allowed to be exposed entirely to the northeast, northwest or north. This is not a common cause, but on rare occasions, in plots with very poor exposure there are really apartments for which it is impossible to meet this requirement and they become studios. Even with such poorly-fitting apartments, if the architect finds only a small window, or the terrace door has a different exposure from the north (C, NW, SI) it allows it to be an official apartment.

Keep prices within reasonable limits

The steady rise in property prices during the boom of construction – 900, 1,000, 1,200, 1,500 per sq m, contractors responded with apartments with smaller and smaller squares to keep the final price in some reasonable psychological Limits. So if in a period of 65,000 euros you could buy a normal 65-70m2 one-bedroom apartment, only one year later the price was again 65,000 euros for one-bedroom apartment, but the entrepreneurs wanted 50-55m2. We all remember these crazy years.

Small property is sought

Another major reason is that the market was looking for these small homes – 30-35m2. Combining this with the former cause led to the design of cooperatives with many small dwellings requiring much more parking than they would have for the same cooperative but with fewer larger apartments. So some of them again become workshops.

Height

There are minimal requirements for bright living in the dwellings, there are no ateliers. At the same time each building is limited to maximum height and terrain level. In the attic floors there is not always enough bright height for apartments (apartments) – so there are studios.

Studio or studio?

The word studio is missing in Bulgarian laws. Studio entered as a business name mainly from residential construction in resorts where the market was foreign-oriented, and this type of small studio apartments were preferred. The word studio is known to West Europeans for a small home. Accordingly, according to the requirement of the project developers, the architects noted the studios as a studio, so that the strangers do not have to wonder what a studio is. The architects of the ect were celebrating the studios as a studio, so as not to have to wonder what the studio is.

Legal, Tax and Other Differences

* If the apartment is declared as the main apartment, the tax is reduced by 50%. Workshops have no relief;

* If for you and your family members, the apartment is the only home, you can not take it away from a contractor and leave you on the street. The legal term is: undetectable. Do not rejoice. If you have a mortgage and a credit to a bank, the irredeemability is not valid. Insensibility does not apply to a studio;

* You do not have an administrative address (address registration) in a workshop. Although many people have such a registration in a studio, you are not entitled by law, and now the regime is tied to previous years;

* According to the Family Code, the atelier is not a family home;

* It is possible to break up a deal if you have sold you an apartment or a home, but it does not meet all the architectural norms to be an apartment;

* You may refuse to install a two-tariff electrometer (living / night) for a studio because you are not a home;

* If you are an atelier owner, you may get certain advantages in disputes over inheritance, divorce, etc. For example, if the other party owns a flat (apartment), and you only have a studio because you have no home.

Can I live in a studio?

This is the question that most worries people holding studios. Although the definition of housing includes “to satisfy housing needs”, living in the atelier and using it to meet housing needs does not make it a dwelling (apartment).

You can actually live there, but according to the letter of the law – no. There is no ban to work in a studio or work around the clock around the office. How will it prove that you live there, and you are not a workaholic creator? I do not know. Contemporary art knows all sorts of strange things. If you live in a family, you can be a 24-hour creative family art installation.

More serious: according to the Territorial Arrangement Art. 178

Constructions or parts of them may not be used for their intended purpose or in breach of the conditions for putting them into service.

In the event of a finding of such an infringement, the Head of the DNSC or the mayor according to the category of construction:

– prohibits with a motivated order the use of the works and orders their release, disconnection of their power supply with electric and thermal energy, with water, gas, telephone and others. The order is mandatory for the suppliers and is executed immediately;

– on the basis of a written act under the Administrative Offenses and Penalties Act, issues a Penalty Decree.

This sounds terrible, and so according to the letter of the law. But until now, I do not know if someone is in such a situation. But do you get to this way lawyers, not architects, and I am not really aware of how many such cases in the administrative court. The state will never send DNSK to a mass demonstration to check where it lives to collect fines and create social tensions, and in the future I will predict that this problem will be legislated because it affects many atelier workers. As practice has been introduced in the 10th years to introduce a building amnesty for illegal construction, politicians will sooner or later solve this problem.

At the moment, such a hypothetical check can only happen on a signal. The bad thing is that there is a complaint – no matter how much we say that the institutions are not working, they are very good at moving such complaints and documents right here, literally reading the laws, and sooner or later they call you at the door. Even if you refuse access, there is a procedure to go with the police. Follow-up protocol follows. If you accidentally enter a violation – immediately hire a lawyer and appeal quickly before moving to a motivated order from the head of the DNSK and stopping electricity, water and more. You will win the administrative court, but any such procedure is accompanied by costs, time and unnecessary nerves.

Somewhere deep in every law and judgment, based on the principle of fairness, but it is best to answer this question to a lawyer who may have participated in such cases and who knows the case law and possible precedents for such cases.

Is it possible to reorganize and change the purpose of a studio in an apartment?

Yes. Neither consent by neighbors nor general assembly is necessary. But it has to be proven with the architectural project that the studio meets all the requirements for an apartment. While you can always build an extra niche wardrobe for storage in each atelier, it is the most complicated and often impossible to provide a parking space.

As you can see, this whole apartment-workshop mess was created not without the help of our architects. But while we have always been in charge of answering and explaining correctly the differences and the reasons, no one has asked us before buying. Trusting to buy a studio of financially interested parties in the deal, as brokers and developers-builders is as naive as you ask the market “are tomatoes fresh?”.

They’re always fresh.

Author – architect D. Popdimitrov and the team of AA Grid Graphics BG

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