Romanian Property News

After Japanese villas, an American school, a German neighbourhood, the outskirts of Bucharest are about to get a corner of English countryside, complete with housing, architecture, and the all-important village pub! The English Village project is due to build an entire…English village near Clinceni, one of the Bucharest satellite villages. Due to its characteristics, the designers of the project didn’t have to be very innnovative with the name: English Village…would do :).
Position-wise, English Village is quite advantaged. It is located south-west of Bucharest, nearby the Bucharest-Alexandria road (far less congested than the North routes), only 10 miles from the Bucharest city centre and one mile away from the Vlasia Forest (one of the oldest forests surrounding Bucharest and, more important, one of the very few still left in place) and the Mihailesti Lake. The project stretches over 24000sqm, but will include only 710 units. This is because the developer, Helios Development SRL, wanted to follow the English village model not only in the style, but also in the size of the new houses (traditional mansion-style english, rather than crammy, terraced cubicles). The smallest houses are the two-bedroom semi-detached Ascot model (pictured on the top of the left hand side computer generated image), are built on a 300sqm plot and include a usable area of 127sqm. Windsor style follows, with three bedrooms, 216 sqm and a plot of 500sqm, then Buckingham, with four bedrooms, 246sqm and a similarly sized plot of 500sqm. For those happy to settle with less, you can get the 1- and 2-bedroom Richmond Apartments, or, why not, the 3-bedroom apartments in the same 2-story buildings. And yes, to complete the picture, the village will have its own Tudor-style pub, The Old Mill, together with a 1360 sqm retail and service area. All good, but what about the prices?


The project website does not include any information about the prices of houses and villas in the English Village, but there are some online articles (such as this one) give some details on costs. The Richmond Apartments will be the more affordable choice in the English Village. Priced between €120k for the one-bedroom flats and €235k for the penthouse apartments (oh, don’t forget to add the VAT too), you’re guaranteed not to end up with any cheap neighbours. Next step up, the semi-detached houses are priced at €215k and, finally, the Windsor and Buckingham detached houses will cost between €200k and €376k (once again, the prices do not include VAT).
The development has already seen a bit of favourable press. The British Ambassador in Romania participated to the opening event; no surprise there, as the project isn’t exactly small, the estimated cost being around the figure of 150 million euros. Unsurprisingly, there were further articles, such as the one here, to highlight the English traditional pub due to be built in the centre of the village. However, we’re still a long way from the finish line. The first phase of the development will end in February 2009 on a sub-plot of 4000 sqm, and will include 40 villas and 70 flats.

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