Vlach House

In addition to his already developed designs for apartment buildings, at the end of the 1930s architect Čeněk Musil created an entirely different type of building, a terraced house for a single family. These plans were created in 1928 for the senior administrator of the Regional Court, František Vlach, and his wife. The contractor on the project was the construction company belonging to František Kovář from Lomnice nad Popelkou.

Perhaps because the building was intended as a terraced house and not an apartment block, the entrance is set back inside the façade, framed in distinctively moulded cornices, just like the windows on the first floor. The entrance, up a short flight of stairs (a unique feature within Musil’s oeuvre), is dominated by a modernist light fitting from synthetic granite (matching the socle of the whole building) with details in copper. The internal layout corresponds to that of a two-generation detached house. On the double-wing floor-plan were situated four independent rooms around the central hall, two of which are living rooms and two are designated in the plan as a kitchen (one perhaps for cooking and one for dining). A similar arrangement occurs on the first floor, reached up a richly decorated wooden staircase situated in the hall. Here we find a kitchen and three living spaces supplemented with a dining room, situated above the ground-floor hallway and porch, and on the façade reflected by the convex window.

One of the few examples of a preserved home in its original state, also in terms of interiors, that is currently still serving as a private residence, although a doctor’s surgery today operates on the ground floor.

(GA)