František Hrouzek’s Villa

This family house was built in today’s Hradební Street and owned by lawyer František Hrouzek, a government councillor from Hradec Králové. The villa was designed by architect Jan Rejchl who did not focus on villas and houses as much as his brother and father did. Apart from the exceptional Walter Stein’s villa, František Hrouzek’s villa can be seen as a typical design by Jan Rejchl.

The total mass of the villa consists of several cubic forms. The building is dominated by a vertical avant-corps with a staircase. The villa has a tented roof. This Rejchl’s concept was based on the prototype of modern urban villas, represented by Jan Kotěra’s villa in Prague–Vinohrady (1908–1909) and modernized with purist morphology.

The villa has a basement, two floors, and an attic. The ground floor and the first floor have identical layouts. The entrance leads through a closet to the central hall leading to two bedrooms, a living room separated from the dining room with a large sliding door, the kitchen, and a bathroom with a lavatory. The residential rooms are oriented to the south-east, overlooking the garden. There is also the maid’s room. In the attic, there are two separate rooms with bathrooms. The basement consists mainly of cellars. The floors are communicatively connected by a separate double staircase.

The building exterior is still preserved almost in its original form. The only change to the plans can be seen in the vertical window above the main entrance; it illuminates the staircase which was supposed to be filled with glass blocks. In addition, the adjacent pavement had to be modernized at the expense of all the building owners. Originally, it had a “three-colour Prague mosaic pattern”; now, it is covered with asphalt.

Ilya Lebedev