Bedřich Honzák’s Villa

In the early 1920s, Theodor Petřík and his wife Milada Petříková-Pavlíková, the first female graduate of architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague, designed several houses.

This villa was designed for Bedřich Honzák who was the head physician at the hospital in Hradec Králové before the war and led the department of surgery, gynaecology and obstetrics after the hospital was enlarged. In the early 1920s, when Petřík and Petříková-Pavlíková worked on the completion of the agricultural school in Kukleny, Honzák asked his niece, Milada Petříková-Pavlíková and her husband to design a family house.

The design on the house for Bedřich Honzák at 657 Balbínova Street in the residential area on Orlické nábřeží Embankment in Hradec Králové fundamentally influenced other work of the two architects and helped them find common architectural forms.

If you looked closely at the first plans of the villa, stored in the archives of architecture in the National Technical Museum, you could see a parter with textured brickwork, a house that was supposed to have a hipped, almost tent roof with high chimneys built of exposed bricks, and a façade horizontally divided by a clearly legible cornice between the ground floor and the first floor. In the project, however, we could notice two corrections made by pencil. One concerned the change of the roof; the other, more important one, the cornice profile. The profile of the cornice between the ground floor and the first floor was probably changed by Theodor Petřík; also, the house edges were bevelled, and a bevelled roof ceiling was added.

The small formal change meant a broad application of bold, almost expressive bevelled cornices, bevelled corner edges, lining and lesenes, and it was more frequently used in architectural plans and designs by Petřík and Pavlíková-Petříková until the late 1920s. Bedřich Honzák’s villa can be compared to residential buildings of the state farm in Topolčany designed by Petřík and Pavlíková-Petříková at that time.

The plans of the two-story villa were approved in June 1923, and the construction was completed in late October 1924. The internal layout corresponds to the type of building, i.e. a urban villa for wealthier clientèle.

On the ground floor, there were utility rooms – two bedrooms, a kitchen, a maid’s room, a separate toilet and bathroom, and a large hall with a terrace facing Balbínova Street. The basement was used mainly for running the house and housed a laundry room, a utility room, and cellars. On the first floor, there were two living rooms facing the street, one room connected to a large bathroom and a walk-in closet, and a hall with a staircase connecting the first and second floors. 

The villa has been preserved in its original form and serves its original purpose. 

ER, LZL