Prague Puts a Listed Farmstead in Suchdol Out to Tender as a CZK 1.07bn Gymnázium

Prague has advertised a tender for the reconstruction of Brandejsův statek in Suchdol into a gymnázium for roughly 400 students, ČTK reported on 25 August from the public procurement bulletin. The estimated value of the contract is CZK 1.066 billion excluding VAT, and the winning bidder will deliver both the design and the construction.

A design-and-build contract for a listed site

The city is procuring the job as design and build: a single supplier provides the project documentation and associated engineering work as well as the building itself. That is a consequential choice on a heritage-protected complex — the farmstead, also known as Suchdolský zámeček, is a listed site that the city says has been deteriorating for a long time. Design and build compresses the programme and puts the design risk with the contractor; on a protected site it also means the bidder, rather than the client, carries the negotiation with heritage authorities into the price.

According to earlier information cited by ČTK, the city expects the design work to take two years and construction another two.

What goes where

The school is to have 12 classrooms with a capacity of 408 students. It will occupy the historic buildings currently referred to as the manor house, the smithy, the barn, the carriage house and the sheepfold. Prague will also put up two new buildings in the complex, one of them containing a gymnasium in the sports sense.

The site does not empty out for the school. The municipal police, which keeps its mounted unit, a station and stabled horses there, stays after the reconstruction, and the scheme retains space for horse breeding. A small community centre is included, and the brief covers premises for community and cultural use alongside the school.

That is a dense programme for one listed farmyard: secondary education, mounted police, stables and a community facility on a single protected site. Whether the classroom count and the horses coexist comfortably is the kind of question a design-and-build tender resolves after award rather than before it.

The shortage behind it

The new gymnázium is intended to help with a long-standing shortage of places in Prague's secondary schools, and gymnázia in particular. Specialists attribute the shortage to population growth combined with students commuting into Prague schools from the Central Bohemian Region — a structural mismatch, in other words, between where the region's teenagers live and where the region's selective schools are.

Beyond building new schools, the city is addressing the gap by expanding existing facilities with extensions and modernisation. Secondary schools in Prague are established by the city hall, as are higher vocational, special, language and basic arts schools; nursery and primary schools are the responsibility of the individual city districts. That division is why a capacity problem at gymnázium level lands on the city's capital budget rather than on Suchdol's.

Archiweb notes that the plan to convert the farmstead into a gymnázium was already reported in May 2026; the tender is the point at which the intention acquires a price.