Singraven estate

The Singraven is a beautiful, traditional estate surrounding a castle and grounds that make clever use of a meander in the Dinkel. The estate covers some 500 hectares, more than half of which is woodland and the rest mainly cultivated and uncultivated land. The last private occupant, W.F. Laan, left the estate to the Edwina van Heek Foundation in 1956. Since then the foundation has devoted its efforts to the preservation of this valuable cultural heritage.

Over the years the estate has incurred a structural running deficit. A solution has to be found to guarantee that the Singraven estate will remain open to the public, which entails some much-needed improvements to the estate itself as well. To that end, BOEi and the Edwina van Heek Foundation plan to build dwellings on some ten locations on the estate between 2016 and 2023. These will be either new buildings or the conversion of existing buildings. The revenue from these leases of land will possibly be enough to keep the estate open for the public. They will also provide an opportunity to carry out green projects. This will make the estate financially self-sufficient in the future without the structural need to apply for grants.

In collaboration with SchipperDouwes architecten, Strootman landschapsarchitecten has conducted a general exploration that offers insight into the existing qualities and characteristics of the estate and designed principles with which the new buildings can be inserted in the landscape in a judicious way.
This exploration is based on a careful analysis of the historical country houses on the estate. It also investigated the rich stratification of landscape types, such as the low-lying, small-scale linear and non-linear brookside landscapes and the historical park landscape.

The principles that emerged from this exploration serve as guidelines for the insertion of the premises in the landscape in terms of plot dimensions, building volumes, optimal dimensioning of building volumes, clustering of housing units to form ensembles, positioning of buildings, design of the boundary between public, private and shared, parking, access and vegetation. This all brings the specific elaboration and implementation of the dwellings a step closer.