Mr. and Ms. Nepasický’s Villa

The villa for the lawyer Jan Kavalír’s family was built on a plot of land near the main road along a hillside, but the building itself is tucked away, deeper into the bowels of the garden. It is a spectacular building, which draws attention to itself by its distinctive verticality, similar to the English-style reconstruction of Jan Kotěra’s guest villa in Bechyně from 1902 to 1903. The villa in Hradec Králové also impresses by the attic with its half-timbering, typical of Nordic architecture, and the conical line of the pillar, typical of English Reformed houses – clearly, Václav Rejchl was learning the principles of the modern housing at that time. However, the elaborate design of the half-hipped roof with a turret is reminiscent of his earlier design of a hunting and shooting pavilion at the Economic and Ethnological Exhibition in Hradec Králové in 1894. The villa layout determines the exterior of the building – Rejchl did not follow any rules of symmetry or formal order. The living rooms were illuminated by large windows, and there were smaller bedrooms upstairs. Rejchl arrived at a similar, partly modern, partly traditional conception of the villa as Jaroslav Pažout did in the case of his villa in the city center. Both villas uses of cyclopean masonry in the base, but Pažout’s villa masonry is not exposed.
 

“The relationship between the villa and the garden is fundamentally about the garden being an extension of the house. [...] A good villa design should give the impression of a self-evident, unforced, supremely simple pattern without voids, holes, and dead corners; every projection and truncated corner, every opening in the façade must be justified [... by] harmony which, having its center of gravity in the very harmony of everyday life, is far from mere decorative puns and deaf effects,” wrote Zdeněk Wirth, who was close to Kotěra’s school and promoted the reform movement for modern housing. These principles must have been well known to Václav Rejchl who first applied them to the country villa in Hradec Králové.
 

LZL