Antonín Petrof’s Villa

An older Art Nouveau bourgeois villa was built on the site of the present villa between 1909 and 1910. Its builder was Antonín Petrof Jr. The building No. 315 was built between 28 July 1909 to 15 December 1910. The basement contained a laundry and cellars; on the ground floor, there was an entrance hall, a kitchen, a pantry, a salon, and a dining room; on the first floor, a hallway, a dressing room, a bathroom, a bedroom, and two rooms. The plans of the original villa have not survived, we can use the drawing of the situation of the house no. 375 next door which was built later. The living rooms were situated to the south, the entrance to the north. In contrast to the elongated symmetrical layout the house acquired after the reconstruction in the early 1920s, the original layout was a much smaller and irregular. We can assume that Oldřich Liska, who according to his records worked for the Petrofs, was involved in the original design, but it is not possible to determine exactly which building it was. Previously, he was credited with the Jan Petrof villa (no. 300).
 

Between 1920 and 1921, the villa was rebuilt (the building was extended and the exterior completely redesigned) by Josef Michko. The villa had a basement and a central hall. Unlike the original building, it has a gabled roof and a gable in the shape of an isosceles triangle. The windows have accentuated lining; the façade on the ground floor is articulated by channeled lozenges. The crown profiled cornice is complemented by metopes and broken by elongated windows. The avant-corps, which originally housed the dining room, faces the garden. The decoration of the exteriors – distinctive profiled cornices, metopes and channeled lesenes – is strikingly similar to the formal vocabulary of Oldřich Liska’s designs for tenement houses and public buildings from this period (the Lido BIO cinema from 1920, the houses of the employees of the State Railways, the city houses in Mánesova and Klumparova Streets from 1919 to 1925, and the trade tenement house from 1920 to 1921). In the 1970s, the villa was converted into an accommodation facility; during the 1990s and in the last two decades, it was gradually adapted and modernized for this purpose. The original internal layout was therefore completely changed. 

 

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