The former U Černého Orla pharmacy building in Velké Meziříčí stands right in the town centre, a short drive from the D1 motorway, and carries over 100 years of history – built in 1932-33 to a design by architect Jiří Michálek, who also designed Prague's Brouk a Babka department store. But the client was not selling it as "an old building that needs renovating". They were selling an investment opportunity to a developer who could see 1,300 m² of potential – and for that, they needed a website that could explain that potential to someone who had never set foot inside.
Without an in-person viewing, the website had to do the job of a real estate agent: tell the building's story, show a concrete redevelopment plan, and above all make sure no serious investor enquiry ever got lost in an inbox.
Instead of a single-page listing, I structured the site as several chapters of a story. A dedicated history page walks through the building from 1864, through 1932 when it was built in the functionalist style, up to the post-war years – with real names (architect Jiří Michálek, pharmacist Libor Šilberský) and one-click switching between each era.
The "Potential" section then turns that history into numbers – a concrete proposal for 10 apartment units on the upper floors and two commercial units (178 m² and 74 m²) on the ground floor, backed by an actual architectural study and renderings on the proposed-state page, so an investor can picture the finished result, not just an empty building.
So no enquiry would ever get lost, I built a password-protected admin panel where every submitted enquiry is saved to a database and emailed out automatically – so the sales contact sees it immediately, and the owner has a complete record even if an email goes astray.
A closed, unused pharmacy became a convincing investment case that a prospect can work through step by step – from the building's story, through a concrete redevelopment plan, to sending an enquiry that will never get lost.
