In 1908, the Czech intelligentsia’s push for national emancipation led to the establishment of the Brno Civil Servants’ Building Cooperative, a registered limited-liability company. Its working language was strictly Czech, and only state or regional officials of Czech nationality could join. The cooperative published a document for its members titled Stavba (Construction), which provided theoretical and practical recommendations for builders, along with references to contemporary trends in the construction of English garden cities or villa districts in Vienna. Potential builders were thus conversant in matters of modern housing trends and related aesthetics. The cooperative’s philosophy was summarized by the sentence: ‘Houses should be so simple that they do not appear to be anything other than what they actually are.’ Even if the ‘simplicity’ of that time may seem somewhat more complicated today, the villas built along these lines met a high architectural and typological standard reflecting the status of their owners, meaning members of the upper middle class. The cooperative recommended that its members work with the architects Papež and Hrdlička and the builders Němeček and Hrdina from Žabovřesky. The cooperative purchased a total of ten plots of land, mostly from smallholders, which were located near the upper part of the wooded hill known then as the Imperial Forest (today Wilsonův les – the Wilson Woods). In late March 1912, the cooperative was in close contact with the architect Valentin Hrdlička, who later became its chief designer and, in 1912–1914, designed severalfamily houses that were built on this land (Krondlova 4, 14, 20–28, Foustkova 4, Březinova 9; B089–B095).
The villa at Krondlova 28 was commissioned by provincial secretary Jaroslav Štěpán (1871–1966) and his wife Marie (1903–1927). Under a contract dated 15 May 1912, the cooperative sold the Štěpáns a plot of land on which they undertook to build a family house by the end of January 1915 at the latest. Working with Hrdlička’s plans, a budget was drawn up, which Jaroslav Štěpán presented in the form of a tender to several builders. The construction work was eventually entrusted to Antonín Müller, who completed it in eight months, in the period from 5 October 1912 to 3 June 1913 (the final price was 22,120 crowns). The content and conditions of the building contract concluded on 4 October 1912 are a good example of the reliability of the era’s building entrepreneurs.
The free-standing ‘Viennese-style’ family villa, whose main facade faces south-west, is situated at the very end of Krondlova Street by the Wilson Woods. The two-storey building, with an almost square floor plan, is laid out as a transverse double-pile building with its main entrance on the north-western elevation. Projecting from the raised ground floor on the south-western street elevation is an open veranda made of white fair-faced brickwork and segmented by barrel-vault arches. The facade on the first floor is similarly made of white fair-faced bricks, decorated with ceramic tiles laid in a chequerboard pattern on the corners and between the windows. A distinctive decorative motif on the first-floor facade is the three-part windows with geometrically segmented ventilation windows and wooden shutters. On the far right of the north-eastern elevation, an avant-corps broken by narrow rectangular windows protrudes from the ground floor and first floor. The ground-floor facade is fitted with wooden trellises for climbing plants. The pavilion roof is covered in fired clay tiles and topped with a tall decorative lightning rod. The villa’s stylish setting is rounded out by a fence made of white painted wooden slats between fair-faced brick pillars. Inside, the ground floor and first floor were designed with an identical, traditional layout: a three-room apartment with a small maid’s room, a bathroom and a kitchen with a pantry. In the basement, which rises above ground level and is clad in stone, there were a laundry room, a food storage room and a one-room caretaker’s apartment.
Worth mentioning from a constructional-technical perspective is the use of cork, which is mentioned in all the budget offers for the Štěpán Villa, although it cannot be confirmed that this material was actually used. Cork is best known for its use in the villa of Dušan Jurkovič, an architect with whom Hrdlička apprenticed in 1907–1911. No precise description of the original interior furnishings is known, but we can assume that Hrdlička designed them as well, as most of his clients also requested a comprehensive interior design, including interior furnishings, meaning furniture and home accessories such as light fixtures, carpets, textiles and curtains. Hrdlička’s Jizba studio was well-placed to meet this demand.
Jaroslav Štěpán and his wife Marie (née Stracková) hailed from two villages near Opava – he from Neplechovice and she from Brumovice. The construction of their family villa was financed by the sale of her parents’ farm. They had two daughters, Vanda (1900–1986) and Marie (1903–1927). In 1928, Vanda married the engineer Přemysl Máša (1895–1945), the son of Jan Máša (1867–1933), a longtime Brno deputy mayor and one of the primary initiators of the Exhibition of Contemporary Culture in Czechoslovakia of 1928. The young couple moved into the first floor of the villa, which her parents, who lived on the ground floor, had previously let out to tenants. The building was owned by the family’s descendants until 2007, when it was sold. Prior to this, some of the furnishings in the study designed for Jan Máša by architect Jaroslav Grunt and produced by United Industrial Design Works had been preserved. (The furniture had come from the Mášas’ earlier apartment on Jaselská Street.) When the new owner modernized the house, the interior layout was almost completely altered, although the facade and the fencing were reverently preserved.
Dagmar Černoušková
