One of Brno’s most distinctive Art Nouveau buildings was built in 1905 near the beginning of busy Veveří Street, close to Žerotínovo náměstí. It was built by the developer Theodor Veselý, but little is known about the identity of the architect of this remarkable building, which stands out from the two neighbouring buildings in terms of height as well as style. According to some of the literature, the builder Karel Kletzl, son of master carpenter and wood wholesaler Theodor Kletzl, played some part in its construction. But Karel Kletzl was not born until 1893, and even his older brother Jan Vladimír Kletzl (1885) would only have been twenty years old when it was built. This hypothesis thus seems very improbable. A more likely scenario is that Theodor Veselý drafted the plans for and built the house himself but commissioned a different architect to design the original facade, as was common practice in Brno at the time.
Whatever the case, the new building that sprang up at Veveří 6 in 1905 was essentially a double house: two four-storey mirror-image structures with large courtyard wings, built back-to-back on the long and narrow parcel and connected by a passage.
The street-facing building was given a wholly original, decorative, symmetrically arranged facade. The horizontally composed ground floor is set off from the vertically oriented but essentially unsegmented zone above it by a broad double band consisting of a cordon ledge and the first-floor windowsills. This verticality is accentuated by a single protruding element, a gently rounded oriel spanning the second and third floors. The oriel is crowned with a balcony and flanked by two pilasters that run to the top of the facade, where they frame the rounded gable. A glazed wrought-iron canopy structure supported by brackets takes the place of a traditional crown cornice.
The street facade has received a remarkably artistic treatment, with abstract organic Art Nouveau ornamentation in rough and smooth plaster, accompanied by more tangible images. At the top are reliefs of dark clouds pierced by the rays of anthropomorphized suns, while at the bottom, on the first floor, a line of undulating clouds rises from distant horizons. More reliefs decorate the windows in the form of tendrils of climbing plants. The central recessed portal, rectangular with rounded corners, is bordered by a slightly recessed convex-concave shape framed from above by a curved segment of cordon ledge. In the recessed area above the entrance, a relief landscape depicts a pair of trees illuminated by the rays of the sun. The balcony terrace on top of the oriel is bounded by a wrought-iron railing decorated with stylized plant tendrils.
The rich artistic decoration of the facade was further enhanced by many other vegetal and abstract ornamental features to produce a highly multifaceted and dynamic overall effect. Many of the original elements have been preserved in the building’s interior, including the decorative railings, the profiled wooden door jambs, the lighting fixtures and the windowpanes.
The building remained the property of the Veselý family until 1917, when Theodor’s widow Ludmila sold it to Karel and Karola Dým. The building is a distinctive variation on loose forms of Western European Art Nouveau. With its unique facade, lightened by the use of glass canopies, it is a striking and unmissable part of the street front and one of the most original buildings on Veveří. As such, it should receive the proper care and maintenance that a building of its quality deserves.
Aleš Homola