The last project of architect Kurt Spielmann in the Hradec Králové region was a house with
a surgery for doctor Oldřich Smetana in Kukleny, built between April and 27 October 1936. Spielmann was asked to rebuild and extend an older, one-story building with a gable roof.
He conceived the street façade concisely (unlike, for example, the Fuchs’ villa) – it was divided by rows of windows with distinctive jambs, there were two loggias on the first floor, and the façade was closed by a crown cornice. The architect used the southern (street) and eastern (side) perimeter walls of the older house, into which he broke larger window openings.
Since the original house had a basement, Spielmann did not have to change it. There was
a corridor, three cellars and a coke store, which was used to heat the house. All the cellars had segmental vaults.
The house has three slightly elevated entrances from the courtyard: the service entrance in the west, connected to the maid’s room (marked as “maid’s”), the kitchen area with
the preparation room and the service staircase; the main garden entrance in the middle, leading through the hall to the living room connected to the dining room by a two-part sliding door; and the side east entrance to the consulting room with the waiting room. The main staircase leads from the hallway beyond the main entrance and there is a separate toilet in the entrance area. The toilet also adjoins the waiting room of the surgery. There is one more room connected to the west service entrance and service staircase, which is not connected
to the residential part of the house in any way. We can therefore speculate that it was possibly intended for leasing. The living rooms on the ground floor are much smaller in contrast to
on being determined by the layout of the earlier building. However, the architect’s desire to make the living and dining rooms as large and connected as possible is evident in the design.
On the first floor, in the western part, accessible by a separate western staircase, there was
a guest room and another maid’s room (again marked “maid’s”), which was originally intended to be a laundry room. The main staircase led to a spacious hall from where a door led to
the laundry and drying room (originally intended to be just a drying room) connected to
the maid’s room. The hall was connected to a dressing room with built-in wardrobes and
a children’s room. The largest room was a bedroom with a dressing room. The eastern loggia was also accessible through the dressing room. The bathroom with a bathtub, sink and bidet was accessible from the hall and from the dressing room next to Mr. Smetana’s bedroom.
A door led from the hall to a terrace facing the garden. The terrace was connected to another loggia accessible from the bathroom. Oldřich Smetana’s villa offered a modern living solution and contained a number of elements typical of Spielmann’s layout of urban representative villas: a double staircase, built-in furniture, continuity and sequencing of living spaces, and
an ingenious communication link between the private floors.
LZL
