Detached apartment building

Alongside the standardised detached houses designed for the Building Co-operative for Workers’ and Families’ Houses (Stavební družstvo dělnických a rodinných domků pro Jičín a okolí) that we’ve already discussed in the Čeřovka quarter, Čeněk Musil also created unique villa designs for specific customers. One of these is the “Happy Home” (Šťastný domov) Villa, commissioned in 1930 by Vilemína Sluková, wife of the government administrator Alois Sluka.

The building contains two separate flats: one on the ground floor and one on the first (approx. 80 m²). Four rooms (a bedroom, dining room, living room and one non-specified) are complemented with a hallway, kitchen and larder, maid’s room and WC/bathroom. The exterior of the building, whose façade consists of a ground-floor part with unabashed brickwork, and an upper part covered in smoothed rendering and a distinctive crowning cornice, with a different design on each side. The main western frontage is dominated by a semi-circular balcony set between the two perpendicular sets of windows. The northern side is dominated by the entrance and the eye-catching cornice running beneath the windows, stretching across the eastern to the southern façade. Here it gracefully transforms into a massive oriel window and glasshouse, no longer standing.

(GA)