Marie Wünschová’s Villa

After 1908, first villas and a new residential area on the border of Hradec Králové and Prague Suburbs started to be built along today’s Střelecká Street. The first houses were built for Václav Píša, Václav Charvát, Karel Janda, and Marie Wünschová. Marie Wünschová was married to Josef Adel Wünsch, the choir director at Holy Spirit Church and the brother of composer Johann Nepomuk Wünsch.
 

The ground-floor house was built relatively quickly: between July and 30 November 1909. The designs are dated June 1909. Architect and builder Jaroslav Pažout designed the exterior in the spirit of his other buildings: as a combination of Art Nouveau ornamentation and stucco imitation of folk architecture, for example, the stucco window shutters. The street façade is divided by the central avant-corps with a segment layout. The building has some Neo-Baroque features such as the curved mansard roof, small attic dormer windows, etc. In the basement, there was a laundry room with stoves and four interconnected vaulted cellars. The house was accessed from the courtyard – behind the hallway, there is a three-flight staircase in a separate shaft; the small kitchen and toilet near the small hall faced the garden. Three large walk-through bedrooms faced the street. The room in the north probably served as a bedroom and had a bathroom next to it. Upstairs, there was another room and the attic under the mansard roof. Originally, there was no sanitation in the location; the house had its own cesspool. On the long plot of land behind the house, there was a well and an orchard as well. The architect also designed the fence: the fencing facing the street was carried by brick pillars and the foundation wall alternating with wrought fields; the rest of the land had a wooden picket fence.
 

The villa in the newly established residential area represented rural architecture; its uncomplicated layout, with the enfilade of rooms facing the street (a series of walk-through rooms) and facility rooms facing the yard or the garden, is reminiscent of traditional rural houses or small summerhouses. This type of layout, however, was far from unique; it was used by a number of local architects and builders at that time. 

 

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