Two-floor staff accommodation for a Czech hospitality and leisure client

The client is a hospitality and leisure operator running a mountain ski area in the Czech Republic. Like every alpine operator, it runs into the same constraint every season: lift attendants, snowmakers, ski-school staff and gastronomy crews all need housing close to the slopes, in a corridor where conventional hotel rooms are scarce and protected-landscape rules make new permanent construction slow and expensive.

Tanax was retained to supply a two-floor staff accommodation building from the Special Purpose family. The brief called for a wide-body cell that reads as a real room from inside, a fire-resistance class that allowed adjacent stacking under Czech building rules, a frame and envelope dimensioned for mountain winters at altitude, and a delivery window that opened the building before the ski season.

External envelope of each cell is 6058 × 2990 × 2800 mm. The width is the headline number. Standard ISO-derived office cells are 2438 mm wide externally, which gives an internal room you can cross in three paces. The 2990 mm cell adds more than half a square metre of usable floor per unit, which is what turns a container from staff dormitory into staff bedroom. Internal floor-to-ceiling height is held at 2500 mm so the room reads as residential rather than industrial.

Fire performance is REI 30 across the floor, walls and ceiling assemblies. That is the rating that allowed the cells to be stacked and grouped on a single site without breaking the building into multiple fire compartments. The steel frame is fabricated to EN 1090-1 EXC2, which is the execution class Tanax runs as standard for B2G and serious B2B work, with welder qualification to EN ISO 9606.

The corrosion-protection stack is built for the alpine mountain climate. Blast cleaning to ISO 8501 Sa 2.5 strips the steel back to near-white metal, then a two-coat paint system in the C3 corrosivity class of EN ISO 12944 is applied in the booth. Visible frame is RAL 7016 anthracite grey, chosen to sit cleanly against the operator's existing mountain infrastructure.

The envelope is PIR sandwich panel on roof and walls. PIR was chosen over mineral wool because it lets the wall section stay slim while holding the heat against minus-twenty winter nights, and because sandwich panels arrive sealed at the seam, which matters where wind-driven snow hunts for any gap. Each cell has electric heating and a 2.6 kW air-conditioning unit, sized so that the same equipment handles summer cooling for off-season crews and shoulder-season events.

Wide-body cells delivered into the resort and assembled into a single two-floor accommodation building. The wide footprint and the fire rating made the building viable inside the resort's existing footprint, without the multi-year permit cycle that a permanent dormitory of the same capacity would have triggered. The project extends the Tanax leisure reference list to Czech alpine operators alongside its Slovak hospitality work.

For Tanax, the project is the proof case for the wide-body cell. The 2990 mm width is the lever that lets a container building compete with conventional staff housing on internal space, and this delivery is the reference we point to when a new ski, spa or holiday-park operator asks whether containers can carry an accommodation programme without looking like a site camp.