Ethos House is the boutique office building that brought the Renaissance Revival style, inspired by San Francisco architecture, to the Bucharest of the 2010s. Developed by Greek entrepreneur Anastasios Gkotsis on a 1,457 sqm plot at the corner of Gh. Țițeica Street and Calea Floreasca, the building gathers about 11,000 sqm on a B+S-B+G+8F regime. An 8-million-euro investment, completed in 2014; in 2025 it was acquired by Pavăl Holding (Dedeman) — confirmation of the long-term value of a project that ran, visually and structurally, against the grain of its time.

Challenges

The project combined three themes rarely handled at once in 2010s Bucharest. Stylistic: bringing a Renaissance Revival vocabulary — exposed brick with cornices, string courses, window surrounds and fine balconies — into a professional context then dominated by ventilated facades with metal cassettes and neutral solutions. Technical: a suite of crafts the Romanian construction market used ever more rarely — wet-set natural stone cladding, faux-stone decorative cornices and string courses, boiserie on walls and ceilings in common spaces. Geotechnical: difficult founding ground, with the water table above the building’s foundation level — the substructure had to guarantee a watertight box in permanent contact with groundwater, carrying G+8 storeys above.

Solutions

Renaissance Revival vocabulary. Red exposed brick on floors 2-7, alternating with white lesenes, string courses and cornices — the register typical of Flatiron / six-flat buildings in San Francisco’s historic districts. The ground floor and semi-basement, treated as a massive Vratsa limestone plinth with visible joints, support the upper volume. On the rounded corner toward Calea Floreasca, the vertical lesenes run the full height, giving the building the silhouette of the early-20th-century American urban typology.

Materials and techniques little used in Romania at the time of construction. Natural stone cladding — Vratsa limestone — on the basement, semi-basement, ground floor, first floor and technical 8th floor, in three distinct finishes, with course-laid slabs of atypical dimensions and machine-cut reveals — wet-set cladding, a technique for which the number of specialised teams in Romania had dropped sharply over the previous decades. The faux-stone decorative cornices and string courses required careful execution detailing, and the boiserie in common areas was detailed to the interwar vocabulary.

The fan-shaped canopy at the main entrance. A signature element: a radial metal structure with frosted glass cover, decorative wrought-iron brackets and ornate wrought-iron access doors carrying the number 240 — a canopy that concentrates the building’s entire stylistic register.

Fewer underground levels through mechanical parking. Against the three basements of the initial authorised design, a single basement plus a semi-basement were chosen in execution — a rigid box of reinforced-concrete raft, structural walls and slabs, watertight under permanent groundwater contact. The reduction was possible by using mechanical parking systems, which kept the required 59 spaces within a more compact, more economical underground volume.

Result

For Ethos House SRL, a landmark building in Floreasca — quickly let to strong tenants (Arval among the first), and sold in 2025 to Pavăl Holding (Dedeman). For the city, a building partly known thanks to its ground-floor venues — Vanderful and the restaurant with the canopy toward Țițeica made Ethos House an urban reference point in Floreasca. The building is BREEAM Very Good certified — a non-trivial technical achievement for a project with heavy, ornamented materials. For PPAE, a project that confirmed the ability to coordinate a technically demanding execution, with materials and techniques recalling former practices — in a market that had almost completely abandoned them.

Do you have an investment in a boutique office building, or a project with stylistic and technical requirements rarely handled in today’s Romanian market? The PPAE team can support your project from concept to completion. Contact us