Jan Petrof’s Villa

According to the Burgomaster’s Office, the plan for the villa, whose owner was the son of the prominent manufacturer and piano maker, Jan Petrof (however, Antonín Petrof Sr is often referred to as the owner), was submitted on 25 July 1907. According to the approval report, construction took place between 26 July 1907 and 1 January 1909. Jan Petrof joined the management of the company the earliest of all Petrof’s descendants, in 1895.
 

The villa had a basement. On the ground floor, there was a hall, a toilet, a bathroom, a pantry, a living room with a dining room, a kitchen, a study, and a stair hall. Upstairs, there was a hall, another toilet, two bedrooms, a lounge, and a bedroom.
 

The simple building has an almost square floor plan. The exterior is articulated only by very concise classical elements – a horizontal profile cornice between the ground floor and the first floor, lesenes on the first floor façade. The exterior is finished with a crown cornice with simple triglyphs and small decorative brackets.
 

The villa has been traditionally attributed to the architect Oldřich Liska, although it is not explicitly listed in his records – both the 1931 and 1946 inventories contain only the entry “1909 – villas for clerks.” The plans were drawn up in the summer of 1907 when Liska was already working in Hradec Králové. Moreover, he did not sign the plans. The historian Matěj Bekera comments, “We can therefore only speculate whether this was a construction carried out by the technical office where Liska worked. But it seems highly probable.” Although Petrof’s villa in no way resembles the traditionalist designs by Oldřich Liska from this period, it shows a detailed knowledge of German classical architecture, especially the simple style of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Its concise conception with minor classical elements is reminiscent of the Neuer Pavilion on the grounds of the Charlottenburg in Berlin (built between 1824 and 1825). The design may have been influenced by Liska’s classical German training he had just finished at that time.
 

However, there is another possibility: the history of architecture attributed the wrong descriptive number to Oldřich Liska who worked on the design of Antonín Petrof Jr.’s villa No. 315, located about 500 m closer to the city in today’s Brněnská Street.
 

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