Villa Tugendhat โ€” manor house
Thomas Ledl ยท CC BY 4.0

Villa Tugendhat

Vila Tugendhat

  • 2 min read
  • 49.207ยฐ N 16.616ยฐ E

Interesting facts

  • The basement holds a Mottenkammer, a room built solely to protect the family's fur coats from moths.
  • The great living floor was originally laid with white linoleum, a deliberately plain surface against the onyx and exotic woods.
  • Much of the original furniture vanished during and after the Second World War, some of it reportedly burned as firewood.
  • The philosopher Ernst Tugendhat, son of Fritz and Greta, spent his early childhood in the house.
  • A meticulous restoration from February 2010 to March 2012 cost about 150 million koruna, with Mies's grandson, architect Dirk Lohan, among its advisers.
  • The villa was listed as a Czech cultural monument in 1969 and first opened to the public as a museum in 1994.
  • The house served as a principal filming location for the 2007 thriller Hannibal Rising.
  • Simon Mawer's novel inspired by the villa was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 and adapted as the film The Affair in 2019.
  • The UNESCO World Heritage property covers just 0.73 hectares, set within a buffer zone of more than 2,800 hectares.
  • The building also included a chauffeur's flat with garages, with its own access to the terrace.

Why it is worth it

From the street, Villa Tugendhat in Brno looks almost modest: a low, flat-roofed white volume at the top of a sloping garden. Only on the garden side does the house reveal itself, opening into a single vast living floor walled in glass, with a panoramic view across the city to ล pilberk Castle. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Lilly Reich and completed in 1930, it is one of the founding works of modern architecture in Europe and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001.

The villa was commissioned by Fritz and Greta Tugendhat, members of a wealthy and influential Jewish family in Brno, and built by the firm of Artur and Moritz Eisler in about fourteen months from the summer of 1929. Mies used a steel frame that freed the interior from load-bearing walls, so that the main floor flows as one open space divided only by freestanding elements. The most famous of these is a wall of golden-brown onyx from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, whose cutting Mies supervised himself and which is partly translucent and changes in the low evening sun; rare tropical woods add warmth to the otherwise bare interior, which had no paintings or ornaments. Two of the huge glass panes can be lowered completely into the floor, like car windows, by machinery in the basement, and the house was fitted with air conditioning, unusual for its day. Mies and Reich designed all of the furniture, including the Tugendhat and Brno chairs, which remain in production.

The family lived here for only eight years before fleeing Nazi persecution in 1938, first to Switzerland and then to Venezuela. The Gestapo confiscated the house, which later served as offices for the Messerschmitt aircraft works, and in 1945 Soviet soldiers were quartered in it. After the war it passed to the state and was used for decades for other purposes, including as a children's physiotherapy centre. On 26 August 1992, Vรกclav Klaus and Vladimรญr Meฤiar met in the villa to sign the agreement dividing Czechoslovakia into two states. The house has also appeared on screen, and inspired Simon Mawer's novel The Glass Room.

Brno, the second-largest city of the Czech Republic and the historic capital of Moravia, grew rich on industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; close to the villa stands the Art Nouveau Lรถw-Beer Villa, the family home of Greta Tugendhat.

Getting there

Villa Tugendhat is in the ฤŒernรก Pole district of Brno, about 1.5 km from the city centre. The nearest airport is Brno-Tuล™any (BRQ), about 8 km away.

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in the Czech Republic 32The Most Beautiful Buildings in the Czech Republic 8The Most Beautiful Country Houses 34The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

Villa Tugendhat is an architecturally significant building in Brno, Czech Republic. It is one of the pioneering prototypes of modern architecture in Europe, and was designed by the German architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. It was built between 1928 and 1930 for Fritz Tugendhat and his wife Greta, of the wealthy and influential Jewish Czech Tugendhat family. Of reinforced concrete, the villa soon became an icon of modernism. Famous for its revolutionary use of space and industrial building materials, the building was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.

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