At the turn of the 20th century, the trend of healthy living in new villa developments was popular with the members of the Brünner Beamtenheim, an association of local civil servants seeking to establish a villa quarter on Žlutý kopec (Yellow Hill). One of the association’s founders was the Viennese architect Ferdinand Hrach, who had moved to Brno in 1893 to work as a professor at the German Technical University. Hrach considered the family house to be the healthiest kind of dwelling, insofar as it had a cultivating influence and strengthened people’s connection to the land and their home, and thus their homeland – a theory he set forth in his 1908 text Heimatkunst und moderner Städtebau.
Hrach built his villa on Hlinky Street in today’s Pisárky neighbourhood, a residential area first developed in the 1870s. When Hrach and his wife Sophie bought the land in August 1900, they were living in an apartment on Kapitána Jaroše Avenue in the building of Sophie’s father, the master carpenter Karl Schipka.
It took only a year to build the two-storey family house, which covered a land area of 159 m2 and contained three separate apartments. There were two two-room apartments on the ground floor, one of which was for servants while the other was rented out. The Hrachs’ apartment took up the first floor and the attic and had ten rooms: six rooms, an anteroom, a kitchen, a servant’s room and a bathroom.
Subsequent modifications to the building’s interior have obscured the original layout. The main entrance probably led through a hall to the separate entrances of the ground floor apartments and to a staircase at the back of the building that led to the first floor and attic. On the first floor, the individual rooms were accessed via a central hallway illuminated from above by a decorative skylight. Of the four large rooms on this level, two had access to a balcony overlooking the main street, while one led onto a vegetable and ornamental garden with a small pool. Two more large rooms were located in the attic space.
On the exterior, the five-bay facade is horizontally divided into three parts by prominent cordon ledges above and below the windows. The ground-floor bossage is interrupted by the centrally placed main entrance. Above this are the bel étage and an attic floor topped by a cornice and a roof parapet. The most prominent facade elements are the oriel and the covered balcony on the first floor. The facade is decorated with vegetal reliefs and mascarons. As with other buildings by Ferdinand Hrach, the olive branch is present as a symbol of the owner’s love of knowledge. We also find plant motifs in the building’s interior, and floral decoration is still preserved in the main entrance in the form of stucco reliefs. Hrach imbued his home, situated in a terraced development on a prestigious suburban street, with a palatial character while applying the formal vocabulary of ‘high’ architecture. Such a stylistic approach contrasts with his designs for three villas in the nearby civil servants’ quarter, which were built at the same time as his home. Here, in a new development of a more rural character, he drew on the tradition of vernacular architecture. (One well-preserved example is the villa of Josef Kosch at Všetičkova 7).
The Hrachs lived in the house until 1922, when they sold it to Maria Samohrdová, the widow of a building official. They then moved with their young daughter Elizabeth Sophie into an apartment building that Sophie Hrach had purchased on Obilní trh (Corn Market).
Šárka Svobodová