Ladislav Zikmund-Lender : Private Commissions of Jan Kotěra

The house is not for decoration, but decoration is for the house.
Those who can refrain from abusing what they do not understand are unfortunately in a small minority.
Instead of harmonizing the house with nature, we harmonize nature with the house.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, a promising, talented architect Jan Kotěra arrives in Prague. After the misunderstanding of his first project, the Peterka House on Wenceslas Square, by the small-bourgeois taste of the Praguers, he immerses himself in private commissions alongside pedagogical and organizational activities. In the years 1901–3, he designed a whole series of family houses, the English Mácha Villa in Bechyně, and the rustic Trmal Villa in Prague, as well as summer cottages such as Herben's Cottage in Hostišov or a villa for his collaborator, decorator František Fröhlich. His designs for furniture sets are also remarkable, closely related to the work of Kotěra's teacher Otto Wagner, classmate Josef Hoffmann, and friend Dušan Jurkovič. In the second half of the first decade of the new century, Kotěra approaches a more distinctive form of family house, which was to serve for several years as a type of individual modernity. This transformation can be traced in the villa of his colleague, sculptor Stanislav Sucharda, or railway director Karel Marek. The pinnacle was his own house in Vinohrady on Hradešínská Street, from which he derived most of the other family houses. A remarkable deviation towards a cubist expression is the duplex – a "small castle" of the sugar factory owners, the Mandelík brothers in Ratboř. The post-war villas, Rýdl's house in Dobruška or Štenc's villa in Všenory, return to a simple classicizing appearance. An inseparable part of these Kotěra's projects are the interiors and custom furniture. Intermediate links also consist of separate furniture sets intended for flats, other houses, or offices.