Tenement House of Václav Rejchl, Jr.

When architect Václav Rejchl, Jr., a son of Václav Rejchl, started to get significant architectural and construction contracts after 1925, he decided to build his own tenement house in Kotěrova Street where he later moved with his family: he designed a nice and very spacious flat that occupies the entire first floor for them. He bought the plot of land as early as 1916 when the land was considerably cheaper. 

The house has four residential floors, an attic facing the courtyard, and a basement. On each floor, there were spacious flats with large rooms. The building has one main entrance and access to the courtyard. The roofing of the saddle-shaped roof was made of baked red clay. The construction consists of three main load-bearing walls. The vertical structures are made of brick; the horizontal ones are made of timber. The bay windows on the front façade are divided into three horizontal axes and separated by a distinct breast-wall on each floor.

In his original project, Václav Rejchl, Jr. used a motif from the tenement house no. 543 where he had his office, designed by Bohumil Waigant in 1913: the strip of convex bulging windows. Rejchl repeated this feature on the other floors and he divided the windows by wide strips of protruding mass. The municipal office, however, did not approve the façade and Rejchl had to modify it to the form we can see today to get the building permit. The strips of breast-walls create a plastic façade that recedes on the top floor with an elongated balcony. The timeless house got rid of the decorative language Rejchl used in his designs two years ago. The coke central heating and spacious rooms with bay, nearly strip windows provided comfortable living.

After 1989, the family of Václav Rejchl, Jr. restituted the house, and it is now owned by his granddaughter. In 2019, the owner’s flat was renovated and the bay windows replaced with new ones, made by local carpenters.