HA-HA Turns Rotterdam's Fire-Scarred Julianakerk into Four Homes

Nine years after a devastating fire, the Julianakerk in Rotterdam has four new homes standing within its surviving brick walls. Rotterdam-based HA-HA Design & Development completed the 700-square-metre JUUL project in 2026 in Heijplaat, a garden village where the church ruin had stood damaged for years.

HA-HA acted as both architect and developer, managing design, development, and realization in-house. Nima Morkoç served as lead architect. Rather than reconstructing the church, the firm took what remained as its point of departure, folding the original walls and foundations into a new residential ensemble that treats heritage, architecture, and landscape as a single whole.

"We did not want to reconstruct the Julianakerk, nor did we want to erase it," said Morkoç. "With JUUL, we are adding a new layer in which traces of the past remain visible while creating space for a new way of living."

The four homes sit within and between the remains of the former church. Old and new stay deliberately distinguishable: the existing brick walls, foundations, and historic elements sit alongside a lightweight contemporary architecture, connected through material, scale, and form. A reinstated spire restores Heijplaat's historic skyline and gives JUUL a recognizable position within the garden village.

HA-HA describes JUUL as a contemporary continuation of Heijplaat's religious and industrial heritage. The firm frames the project as a new form of social monumentality — no longer centered around religion, but around living and community.

The lightweight timber structure drove the technical strategy. Because the new construction weighs considerably less than the former church building, the homes fit within the structural capacity of the existing foundations. Not a single new foundation pile was driven for JUUL, leaving the historic base of the church intact.

Landscape carries the site's history as well. Planting beds extend from inside the former church toward the exterior, connecting the homes, courtyard, and historic walls. Within the church walls, the planting carries symbolic weight: in autumn the vegetation turns red, a subtle reference to the fire from which JUUL emerged.

The combination of the timber structure, reused foundations, solar panels, and bio-based materials such as bamboo reduces the material and environmental impact of the new construction. But HA-HA argues the project's significance extends beyond technical performance. By introducing housing and community into the former church, JUUL carries forward both the spatial and social meaning of the monument — a model for how fire-damaged heritage can be transformed rather than rebuilt.