Walls were kept deliberately thin, in many cases so that neighbors would be able to overhear each other's conversations. Inside, the flats featured almost identical floor plans, designs and fixtures.
It is still easy for a newcomer to get lost driving around the outlying neighborhoods of Vilnius or Kaunas because all you see is gray box after gray box for kilometers. One or two vibrantly lit modern stores are the only landmarks a driver can use to navigate by.
In the chaotic years immediately before and after independence, Lithuanians went on a short-lived building craze. They overcompensated for the years of enforced claustrophobia and lack of privacy. They built what they wanted, where they wanted and as big as they wanted. Urban planning was haphazard or non-existent.
Scores of massive, cinder block private "castles" popped up in empty building lots around the larger cities, some even featuring turrets. Homes three and four stories tall with hundreds of square meters of living space intended for an extended family were the norm.
Building supplies for these houses were appropriated from former state-owned supply yards or trucked in from other regions of the former Soviet Union. They were dirt cheap, plentiful and easy to come by.
Few people were shrewd enough to realize that the salad days of state-subsidized heating and electricity and cheap fuel from the former Soviet Union's eastern republics would soon be driven into line by world market forces.
Today, driving along any Lithuanian highway, one can see these behemoth structures standing like a flotilla of beached shipwrecks in a treeless landscape. Some have been abandoned, others remain half-finished.
In many cases families have sealed themselves into living quarters occupying a fraction of the actual space. They often use wood for heating and cultivate large vegetable and potato patches to help ease the burden of feeding a family. Advertisements offering to trade one of these homes for a flat in the city are fairly common.
But in the span of a decade Lithuanians have learned their lesson. A new generation of builders and developers that better understands the needs of today's housing market has arrived on the scene.
Castles for kings
Rimtautas Vizgirda, a Lithuanian who grew up in Los Angeles, heads a partnership of investors who are building the largest development of individual family homes in Lithuania. He and his partners, Geoffrey Bersey and Kestutis Mergevicius, intend to build a total of 400 houses about 15 kilometers outside of Vilnius.
They are effectively building a small, self-contained town. "We are not just selling houses but an entire lifestyle," said Vizgirda.
The development is located in Bendoriai, a tiny hamlet five kilometers from the exclusive Meridien Villon hotel. The "lifestyle" concept is already somewhat tired in North America and has been around since the baby boom generation got its first taste of cash during the junk-bond craze in the mid-1980s. But in today's Lithuania it is something of a novelty.
The housing community will have tight security, a large swimming pool, a church, a school and several commercial developments such as dry cleaners and restaurants. People buying into the project will have to pay a monthly fee for services like waste and snow removal and will also be required to sign an agreement prohibiting them from painting their houses in garish colors, planting trees that obstruct their neighbors' view or keeping livestock on their property.
"We want the people who live here to have a sense of community," said Mindaugas Adomaitis, one of the project's architects. "They should be able to know they have neighbors without seeing them."
Adomaitis also stressed that the development will improve the surrounding natural environment as much as possible. "We want as many trees and shrubs around as possible and we want to do as little damage to the area as we can."
Adomaitis has decades of experience as an architect. "I used to build Soviet bunker-style housing as that's all we could do in the old days," he said. In post-independent Lithuania he woke up one day to find himself without a job. "I started designing houses for private owners in exchange for cars," he said.
Today he manages large-scale projects in Lithuania, Russia and Armenia. "Vilnius has many fine young architects," he said. "They can draw pretty pictures of buildings for a low price, but I almost always end up cleaning up after them. In the end, you have to know where all your wiring, plumbing and ventilation has to go."
Adomaitis said he could sketch a plan of the Bendoriai project from memory, including the entire hidden infrastructure.
The project is expected to cost around 200 million litas ($50 million). It will be complete in 2004. Financing was arranged through Zemes Ukio Bankas. To date, 37 homes are nearing completion and one model home has already been built.
Vizgirda and Bersey have not yet begun to market their development, but interest is obviously high as potential buyers have recently been arriving unannounced to view the site.
The price of a newly built home in Bendoriai will be roughly 400,000 litas. Prospective buyers will be able to choose from several models depending on the size of their families. Interiors will be finished but designed in such a way that the owners will be able to renovate them according to their tastes.
Castles for the masses
While the Bendoriai development is intended for wealthy Lithuanians and foreigner executives working in the country, thousands of lower income Lithuanians are building homes themselves. They do this in their spare time with the assistance of their friends and relatives, scrounging building materials whenever they can.
Rimas and Karolina Janionis are a young couple with one child living in Dvarcionys, a modern housing community 10 kilometers from Vilnius' city center. They both have good jobs and work hard, but they do not belong to Lithuania's business elite.
Soon after marrying in 1994, they bought a 600-square-meter property with the foundations of a house for 16,000 litas. They had previously been living together with Rimas' parents and grandparents in a seven-bedroom apartment in Vilnius.
"We needed more space and the apartment was sold by the family so that we could all acquire our own properties," said Rimas.
Rimas is a food products sales agent. But like many Lithuanians who grew up under the Soviet regime, he is the proverbial jack-of-all-trades. Without the 24-hour access to specialized services that Westerners enjoy, Lithuanians have been forced to know about everything from car and television repairs to construction. "I built this whole house almost with my own hands," he said.
He also received a lot of help from friends and relatives and read books and magazines on construction. Most of the building materials were bought on the cheap through classified advertisements or given to him by relatives. He estimates he spent about 56,000 litas on these. "Instead of buying pre-mixed concrete, I would actually buy the ingredients separately and make it myself. That's how careful I've been with our money."
The 120-square-meter house is worth between 200,000 litas and 240,000 litas in today's market.
The couple rarely travel as all their free time is devoted to improving their home. "About five years from now we'll be ready to go abroad somewhere," said Rimas.
His wife Karolina said that the house grows on her all the time. "Right now, we just love to see how our house is improving with every year. The day I most look forward to is when we build our Jacuzzi," she said.
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