Antonín Petrof’s Villa

After Josef Gočár left the studio of his teacher and friend Jan Kotěra, he worked on a wide range of commissions, from utopian monumental architecture to tenement houses and department stores to family house projects and memorial and sepulchral architecture. Among the family houses, Gočár designed Josef Bink’s villa in Krucemburk in 1907–1908, which, despite its geometric decoration and English layout, bears the hallmarks of vernacular and rural architecture, but from 1909–1910 we have several designs for urban villas, which he conceived in a completely different way.

 

At this time there was a lively debate about the form of the urban house. The second edition of the newly founded magazine Styl, which became a manifesto for modern architecture and design, published several texts on modern villas. Among the prototypes published here were Jan Kotěra’s own villa with a studio and architectural school, which had just been completed in Prague’s Vinohrady district, Miroslav Vyskočil’s more conservative villa in Česká Třebová designed by Alois Dryák, and Josef Gočár’s design for Antonín Petrof’s villa in Hradec Králové. At this time Gočár was inspired by Northern Italian mannerist houses, which was most evident in the unrealized design of the house of Emanuel and Pavla Mazánek in Soudná u Jičín. The same style is also found in Petrof’s villa, and Gočár’s Italian inspirations could also be found in some of the sacred buildings from this period: the Luther Institute in Hradec Králové and the Protestant Church in Louny.

 

Petrofs’ villa has a distinctive projecting portico. A small vestibule leads to the service part of the house with a kitchen, pantry, maids’ room, and laundry. Visitors, however, were directed to the hallway, a sort of glazed loggia, ending with the reception room. The loggia was connected by a portal with columns to the dining room, which was the center of the house. The dining room was connected to the kitchen by a small food preparation room. From both the dining room and the reception room, visitors were led to a living room facing the garden, with a music alcove containing a piano and probably other musical instruments. The living room was connected to the generous sunroom by a three-part glass door. A separate staircase at the rear of the house led to the first floor. The first floor had a smaller footprint than the vast ground floor due to the extensive terraces that surrounded it. The floor plan was to be symmetrical – two rooms, a bedroom and a living room, connected by a toilet with two closets. In addition to the bedroom, there was a bathroom, which ran out from the floor plan into the garden. The first floor was surrounded on the south and east sides by a sloping roof terrace, and on the west side by a loggia covered by a canopy, which carried arched arcades. The attic, accessible by a separate staircase, contained a larger guest room and an unspecified room. The house was to have a basement, with storage space in the cellar and

a two-room caretaker’s dwelling.

 

The rugged exterior was richly decorated – the sunroom and loggia with its portico were probably to be clad in decorative, black and white oblong tiles, as was the main, wide gable.

A circular window was broken in the smaller gable of the guest room. All rooms were to be lit by large, clustered windows on the first floor. A further convexly curved ground-floor wing containing the reception living room projected from the front. The house also had a rear entrance from the garden, which ingeniously led to the service and social areas of the ground floor.

 

In the end, the project was not realized and the family of the manufacturer Antonín Petrof preferred a much more conservative, but certainly cheaper project in a historicist style by Oldřich Liska. 

 

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