Mr and Mrs Novák’s Villa

In the spring of 1908, teacher František Novák and his wife asked architect and builder Jaroslav Pažout to design a villa with rental flats for them. Pažout excelled in meeting his clients’ demands for conservative decoration and layouts. For Mr and Mrs Novák, he designed a corner villa at the crossroads of today’s Hradební and Nezvalova Streets on a small, irregular plot of land. The original project was later slightly changed, mainly in the number, structure and size of the windows – originally, both the ground floor and the first floor were supposed to have the same number and size of windows. The construction of the villa took place between autumn 1908 and spring 1909.
 

The exterior features an impressive corner polygonal tower, serving as a stairwell, with a gallery with decorative carved wooden railings on the first floor. The villa has two wings connected at an angle of about 120 degrees. The gable facing Hradební Street is divided by embossed lesenes. It is broken by four narrow windows on the ground floor and two three-part windows on the first floor, framed by stucco imitations of window shutters. The gable with a hipped gable is decorated with stucco imitations of folk wooden gables. The narrower façade facing Nezvalova Street has a three-part composite window on the ground floor and the first floor; the ground floor is embossed and the first floor divided by imitations of half-timbering. The villa has a hipped roof and a basement.
 

The building consisted of a total of four residential units. In the basement, there were fuel and food storerooms, a laundry, and a bathroom for two smaller households. On the ground-floor, there was a larger, east-facing flat, apparently inhabited by Mr and Ms Novák – while the design plans indicated the function of each room (e.g. “dining hall”) in this flat, all the other flats had just “rooms”. An oblong hallway divides the larger flat into the street section with two large bedrooms and the courtyard section with a dining room with a polygonal niche, toilet (accessible from the hall), bathroom (accessible from the dining room) and maid’s room (accessible from the dining room). Behind the hallway, there is the kitchen with a pantry. The smaller flat, facing the street to the north, included a larger room, kitchen, toilet, and pantry. Behind the stairwell tower, there was a skylight that illuminated and provided ventilation for the hallways, toilets and pantries. On the ground floor, there were two small oblong closets accessible from the large rooms of both the flats. The villa had no central heating; every room had a stove leading to three chimneys.
 

Part of the roofing made of clay tiles was replaced with asbestos cement prefab elements. The villa exterior has recently been carefully restored to its original appearance.

 

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