Tenement House of Josef and Eliška Hlavatý

Permission to construct a tenement house for Josef and Eliška Hlavatý was granted on 19 November 1925. Construction commenced in November 1925 and concluded in July the following year. The building permit was officially issued on 29 July 1926.
 

The basement comprised two spacious rooms for cellars, a laundry room, a residential kitchen with a hallway and a caretaker’s toilet, and a one-room apartment with a kitchen, hallway, and toilet. The ground floor was divided into two sections: the left part designed for two smaller shops with storage at the back, and the right part for a savings bank with a small waiting room, counters, office, director’s office, and a reception area facing the courtyard. The savings bank also included a servant’s room with a toilet. The house had four entrances: three in the central vestibule (one to the house, one to the savings bank, and one to the nearest shop) and a separate shop window entrance to the more distant shop. The layouts of the first to third floors were nearly identical, each floor containing two symmetrically identical apartments. These apartments had three passage rooms facing the street; facing the courtyard, there was a bathroom, a maid’s room, a kitchen, a pantry, a hallway with a pavilion, and a toilet. The original plans of October 1925 envisioned slightly projecting bay windows facing the street, while the system of half-hipped balconies on the second and third floors was introduced in the final version. In the attic, two symmetrical small apartments with a room, kitchen, pantry, and toilet were situated facing the courtyard, while a large attic space faced the street.
 

The exterior features balconies set in the central axis of the street façade on the second and third floors between two rectangular bay windows. Decorative stucco friezes adorn these bay windows between the first and second, and the second and third floors, depicting hunting attributes between the first and second floors and haymaking between the second and third floors. The cornice separating the ground and first floors is supported by metopes. Although the project initially included a large frieze of a flower with a figure of a putto above the portal, it was not ultimately fitted. The entrance is flanked by two stucco figures, the sower on the left and the reaper on the right, symbolizing the entire agricultural cycle.
 

The collaboration with František Jaroslav Černý proved beneficial for Josef Hlavatý, as he later purchased the land around the corner in the same street block. He asked Černý to collaborate again, and the contractor facilitated the services of the architect Josef Gočár.
 

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