At the time of its completion in the summer of 1902, architectural journals called this family villa on the western stretch of Hlinka Street (then Schreibwaldstrasse) in the Pisárky villa district (German: Schreibwald) the most modern house in the monarchy. It was built for the well-known Brno lawyer Karl Reissig Jr. (1863–1948), the scion of a prominent middle-class family with a history in the legal profession. His father, the attorney Karl Reissig Sr. (1832–1908), was the director of the Moravian Mortgage Bank and a founding member of the German House who, as an enthusiastic sport shooter, served on the board of the Brno Burghers’ Shooting Club. In 1861, he married Gabriela von Ott, the daughter of Brno’s mayor. Karl Reissig Jr., the eldest of their three children, excelled in commercial law and represented a number of industrialists and their companies and estates. In 1889, he married Karoline Krackhardt (1868–1939), whose father owned a machine factory in Brno. One of Karl Reissig Jr.’s clients was Viktor Bauer Sr. (1847–1911), owner of the Old Brno sugar refinery, from whom Reissig purchased a building plot (part of what was known as ‘Bauer’s Ramp’) for almost 19,000 crowns.
The Reissig Villa was designed by the architect Leopold Bauer and, according to surviving correspondence, built by the Brno builder Adolf Bacher. Construction took one-and-a-half years. The Municipal Bulletin of the Provincial Capital of Brno for 1902 described the house as a two-storey new build with three units (11 rooms, 2 hallways, 2 kitchens, 2 bathrooms, 2 pantries and 4 toilets). It is in fact a large single-family villa, designed in the spirit of the English family home, except that the picturesque ‘cottage’ style with tall half-timbered gables was replaced by mansard roofs and abstract geometric ornamentation. From the two-storey hall with open gallery on the raised ground floor, one could access a dining room with an open terrace (later walled off) and a library with a reading corner located in a small nook four steps higher than the library. From the gallery on the upper floor one could enter the main bedroom with adjoining dressing room and bathroom and also an anteroom leading to the children’s room, a small room for a governess, the children’s bathroom and a long room designed among other things for children’s games. Additional living quarters, including a bathroom, a home gym (children’s playroom) and a terrace, were located in the attic. The basement spaces housed service rooms, a large kitchen and the building caretaker’s quarters.
The building was characterized by high standards in terms of both technology (iron and concrete elements used in construction, iron winding service staircase, central heating, electric lighting) and hygiene. Leopold Bauer’s interior design was dominated by the use of geometric forms and square motifs. The main material was white wood (the furniture was produced by Brno’s Deutsch company), enlivened by the use of coloured glass from the Spaun glassworks in Klášterský Mlýn on the staircase, the gallery railings and the cabinets in the upstairs game room. The walls and ceiling of the raised nook in the library were covered with textile wallpaper decorated with a burgundy floral motif. Bauer also designed the interior light fittings, door and window fittings and gold-coloured brass light switches.
A distinctive quality of the Reissig Villa are its facades. The predominantly square windows of various sizes, designed without framing elements, respect the building’s interior layout and lighting needs. The basement socle is made of rough stone (the property wall with wooden gates and square-patterned fencing sits atop a similar socle), while the area above the socle and by the entrance staircase is clad in ceramic tiles. The roughcast facades are topped by decorative gables with black ceramic squares with gold trim set into the stucco in diagonal sculptural lines. An important element framing the building was its garden. Bauer arranged the paths and lawns into right-angled forms into which he inserted a ‘rondel’ with a circular table and a bench placed atop a polygonal plinth. There also were a tennis court (used as an ice-skating rink in winter), a small swimming pool with an adjoining sun terrace, a Russian skittles game and a small garden house (no longer existent). White garden furniture was arranged around the outside of the house and on the terraces. In this way, the building’s owner proclaimed his focus on a healthy body, complemented by the cultivation of the spirit as symbolized by the owl statue on the roof of the villa.
Brno’s Reissig Villa is Leopold Bauer’s first-ever realized project. To some extent, it is based on the design he submitted to the famous architecture competition for a ‘House for an Art Lover’, announced in the autumn of 1900 by Alexander Koch’s Darmstadt-based magazine Innen-Dekoration. The jury did not award a first prize, second prize went to the famous British architect Baillie Scott, and the first of the three third prizes went to Leopold Bauer. Similarities to other works by Bauer may be found in his designs for a villa for the art historian Gustav Glück and a villa with a ‘tall gable’ (1901, unrealized). Karl Reissig Jr., who throughout his life was convinced that ‘all human relations must be founded on the principles of decency and mutual trust’, was later forced to leave his home and was expelled to Austria in the summer of 1945. The villa was placed under national administration and later became the property of the Czechoslovak state. It is currently the longtime seat of the Central Institute for Supervising and Testing in Agriculture, which endeavours to preserve the building and many of its surviving features in their original form.
Dagmar Černoušková
