So a bit of history (what else?); The Villa Tugendhat was commissioned by Greta and Fritz Tugendhat in 1928 as a marriage gift from Greta's father. The couple were Jewish Germans, who's family had made their wealth from the textiles trade. As a great fan of Mies Van der Rohe, Greta was eager to commission him for her new home on a plot of her father's land in Brno. They began building in 1929, with the entire building made with reinforced concrete and steel pillars going through the house. The building is three storeys, with the family quarters on the top floor, the vast living space below, and the basement which holds the guts of the house, but is now the main exhibition hall of the building. Mies Van der Rohe and Lilly Reich filled the house with exotic and luxurious materials, as well as Lilly Reich's especially designed furniture for the house such as the Brno and Tugendhat chairs.The building was finished within 14 months, but the family with three children only spent 8 years there, before fleeing Czechoslovakia for Switzerland. The house was seized by the Nazis in 1939 and used as an apartment and office, and much of the interiors went missing, probably selling the materials or moving them to other Nazi buildings. During WWII it suffered a lot of damage, and was used as Soviet headquarters for a while.
After the war, it served a few other purposes until being recognised in the late 60s as a building that needed restoration and protection. The final restoration began in 2012, recreating almost all of the interiors thanks to Fritz Tugendhat's personal photographs - thankfully he was a keen photographer, and used one of the rooms in the basement as his personal darkroom.
We had a fantastic tour guide, Magdalena who really knew her stuff and noticed how giddy we were all getting. We could barely get past the heat forming shoe socks (seriously though AMAZING invention, and not like ugly shower caps) before doing Oohs and Aahs and taking photos and videos.
We started outside on the balcony, and in the afternoon sun we had a glorious view of the garden. The minimalist design of the building and its features created some interesting shadows, following the angular lines of the villa. I ran out of film before I could photograph the whole building, but thank God for phone camera's eh (and Instagram!). The little patio had doors into the children's rooms, so the balcony acted as their play/outdoor area. As we went around the house, you could tell that the kids played little into the design of the house, it didn't seem like MVdR like children much...
We first had a tour of the living quarters, which as it goes just looked like bedrooms and studies EXCEPT FOR their bathroom which I immediately fell in love with. The parent's bathroom was this spectacular tiled room with windows in the roof for natural light to come in. But main thing was all of the features, the showerhead, the taps and the sinks are just beautifully formed objects... I promise it wasn't just me, the details really did get to all of us. We were all taking photos of hinges and door stops, which apparently visitors barely notice, so Magdalena spent some extra time pointing out special details in the house. Anyway, if I could have one thing, it would be that damn showerhead. Another favourite was all of the inbuilt cupboards, shelves and wardrobes, all made of the most exotic and decorative hardwoods I've ever seen.
On the other side of the room (which I didn't get pictures of) there was a huge round black table with something like 20 chairs around it. All along I thought it was a conference table, but turns out it was also meant to be the dining table...I can't imagine a family of five using it, but it was nevertheless beautiful. It was framed by a curved ebony wall, open at one side for the view, and all the chairs contrasted the black table and dark walls in white veal leather - each chair took three baby cows to make, which made me a bit sick as to how decadent they were. They had around 50 chairs...thats a lot of cows.
The last part of the tour took us downstairs, which aside from an exhibition area, explored all the workings of the house. The house still uses its original air conditioning and heating system which was insane that something from the 1930s, using very basic physics, still worked in great condition. It brought fresh air from the outside, cooled and filtered in back up into the house, and in winter could heat it up to keep the house warm. Through a series of doors we reached Fritz's dark room, which is completely empty of things because ironically there is little documentation of the room he was probably most in! Most impressive of all, through the dark room was another room which turned out to be Greta's fur fridge - I kid not, a fridge just for her fur coats and accessories. However, it is important because its the only place in the house with the original tiles, which given the amount of tiling that was in the house, it's impressive that they were missed when the others all disappeared or were destroyed.
We were hoping to hear a little more about Lilly Reich, as by Thursday (especially after Hundertwasser) we were a bit sick of dominant male visionary designers, who block the importance of the people who worked with them. We ran out of time to really discuss it, but Lilly was the one who picked much of the materials for the interiors, as well as the colour schemes and designing the furniture. It's a shame that she gets little recognition for the Villa, especially because the interiors were so impressive, and as bold and decadent as Mies Van der Rohe's architecture. I'm hoping I'll have time over the summer to look her up a little more, and maybe come across an exhibition or two on trips to Germany.
It turned out Brno has a lot to see, so we hope we can return there to discover a little more!
