Villa Otto Petschek

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Villa Otto Petschek in Prague (2013)

The Villa Otto Petschek ( Czech : Vila Otto Petschka ) is a neo-baroque bourgeois villa in Prague-Bubeneč . It was built between 1924 and 1930 by the German-speaking banker and industrialist Otto Petschek . The property has a botanical garden with numerous exotic plants, including a new variety of mountain aster that was specially bred for the client : the Aster amellus' Dr. Otto Petschek ' .

The domicile now serves as the residence of the US ambassadors in the Czech Republic .

history

A dining room in the villa (2011)
Music salon in the Villa Otto Petschek (2013)

In 1923 Otto Petschek bought the land 746–750 in Bubentsch (Czech "Bubeneč"). A year later, the German-speaking architect Max Spielmann began building the villa, the designs of which were largely made by Petschek himself. With the construction of the villa he wanted to demonstrate his wealth and social status. It was completed in the winter of 1929/30. Petschek's wife and children did not like the villa. Together with his family he could only use the new domicile for a short time, Otto Petschek died on July 2nd, 1934 at the age of 51 in Vienna .

After his death, the Prague Petscheks decided to give up their business in Central Europe. The heirs bundled their companies in a US holding, United Continental Corp. based in New York. Between 1934 and 1938, all members of the Prague Petscheks first established themselves in England, later they moved to the USA and some to Argentina, where the family also owned businesses. Before they moved, they used the property for representative purposes, among others King Alexander of Yugoslavia and King Charles II of Romania visited the house at that time . The heirs sold Otto Petschek's villa to Živnostenská banka before the Munich Agreement .

From November 1939 to May 1945 Rudolf Toussaint used the villa as a residence as a military attaché and later city commander of Prague. After the Second World War , first generals of the Red Army , and later the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defense, moved into the domicile. In September 1945 the US ambassador Laurence Steinhardt rented the property from the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defense. Since then, Villa Otto Petschek has officially served as the residence of the US ambassadors and their families in Prague.

On July 20, 1948, the US government bought the entire property from the city of Prague for an imaginary $ 1,570,000. That is, they offset the amount against excess military equipment that the US Army had left with the Czechoslovak Army when it withdrew from West Bohemia . During the communist rule, the US residence also served as a conspiratorial meeting point for opposition and dissidents . Many social events and conversations with opponents of the regime were held in the villa by Shirley Temple , who was chief of protocol in 1976 and 1977 and US ambassador to Prague from 1989 to 1992.

The villa is also available as a residence for the US presidents on state visits. George HW Bush , George W. Bush and Barack Obama, among others, have already stayed here . In April 2010, Barack Obama met Dmitri Medvedev at Villa Otto Petschek to sign a new START contract , along with a gala dinner with government representatives from eleven Central and Eastern European countries.

Officially, the US authorities simply call the residence “Petschek Villa”. However, this name is ambiguous and can be misunderstood, as the Petscheks left 13 villas in Prague alone. Two of Otto Petschek's three brothers also built representative villas in Bubeneč in the 1920s: Villa Hans Petschek and Villa Friedrich Petschek, both of which were used by the Diplomatic Corps of the Soviet Union from 1945 and have served as the Russian Federation's embassy and residence since 1990 . Viktor Petschek, Otto Petschek's son, also had a villa built in Bubeneč, which has been the embassy of the People's Republic of China since 1950 . In addition, there is the residence of the Chinese ambassadors in the immediate vicinity , which is located in the Villa Bertha Petschek.

Of all the residences, however, Villa Otto Petschek is the largest and most luxurious. It is located at 181/3 Ronald Reagan Street ( Dr. Zikmund Winter Street until 2011 ). Between 2011 and 2013 the villa was completely renovated. Every year the residence's garden hosts the traditional celebration of US Independence Day, to which important personalities, politicians and diplomats are invited.

The Villa Otto Petschek is not to be confused with the Petschek Palace (Czech "Petschkův palác", more often "Pečkův palác"). The Petschek Palace is the name given to the monumental Bankhaus Petschek & Co. in Prague's New Town , also built by Max Spielmann in neoclassical style between 1923 and 1929 , which now houses part of the Czech Ministry of Trade and Industry.

architecture

One of the two entrance areas of the residence (2013)

Spielmann was the Petschek's “house architect” and an expert on historicism . Inspired by the French Baroque and Rococo as well as Beaux-Arts- and Josephine architecture , the Villa Otto Petschek represents a mixture of different architectural styles . Spielmann implemented designs and ideas that Otto Petschek put together himself after visiting many mansions on various trips across Europe would have. Among other things, Petschek traveled several times to Versailles , which can be clearly seen in several elements of the facade and original interior fittings of the villa.

The building is three-story and has a mansard roof made of copper. The roofline is an obvious homage to Versailles. The floor plan of the villa is divided into three parts and consists of a central rotunda , which is flanked by two straight east and west wings. Both wings open to the southeast towards the garden. The facade of the building is made of natural stone , sandstone and limestone . Six different types of stone were used throughout the villa, including marble from different countries and elaborate scagliola .

The building is entered through a labyrinth of two cloakroom corridors that lead to the rotunda and the winter garden . The winter garden is separated from the outside terrace by a huge retractable glass wall. The ground floor was used for social purposes, while the upper and attic floors were reserved for Otto Petschek's family. There are a total of 148 rooms in the building. These included seven bathrooms, 18 bedrooms, as well as several salons and dining rooms, libraries, a mirror room, a music room, a dance hall, a fitness and sports studio and an 18-meter-long indoor pool in the Roman bath style. There is also an outdoor pool and a tennis court in the villa's garden. Petschek had several elevators installed in the building. There are other outbuildings on the site that originally served the staff, including two houses at the north gate for the porter and the gardener.

The total costs for the construction of the villa, including the interior fittings, the garden design and the outbuildings for the domestic staff, amounted to 300 million crowns. The technical facilities of the Villa Otto Petschek were at the highest level of development at the time and comparable to the technical facilities of the ultra-modern Villa Tugendhat in Brno , built in 1930 , which cost 5 million crowns to complete. Czechoslovak nationalists and communists despised the architecture of Villa Otto Petschek. In their opinion, it represented a direct connection to the architectural style and taste of the Habsburg monarchy and thus an attempted "revival style".

Furnishing

A bathroom in the Villa Otto Petschek (2013)

The interior of the villa was carried out by Emil Gerstel & Co. and was personally managed by Friedrich Gerstel. The Prague company already had to kk times in the Austria-Hungarian upper class as renowned wallpapering, upholsterer, Dekorateur- and furniture manufacturer. Originally, the furniture in Villa Otto Petschek was stylistically different, but mainly concentrated on Ludwig XIV. Otto Petschek brought numerous works of art, tapestries and antique furniture with him from his travels from all over Europe, including a complete Louis-seize music salon, which he and the Had the wall paneling removed from a French castle. At an auction, Petschek bought two original Louis XIV armchairs, of which Friedrich Gerstel made 32 replicas for the interior of the villa.

Most of the original inventory was taken by Otto Petschek's heirs when they moved to England. In the Czech archives there are detailed export lists of items subject to duty, which the Prague Pechek created in English and Czech. There is evidence that they not only exported valuables such as paintings, silver, tapestries, porcelain, crystal, chandeliers and pianos, but also all household items; starting with dining room and garden furniture, tables, chairs, to wine boxes, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, kitchen utensils, children's stools, pillows, bedside tables, plants, flower pots, books, toys. The documented volume of objects taken via the Vltava harbor alone comprised 127 shiploads, whereby this was the inventory from several Prague Petschek villas.

Today's furniture and furnishings in Villa Otto Petschek come largely from mansions of expelled Germans from Czechoslovakia . After the Second World War , the Beneš regime confiscated hundreds of such properties , mainly from Sudeten Germans, and in many cases sold the inventory of these properties to diplomatic missions. According to official information from the US government, several of these pieces of furniture, art and furnishings are also in Palais Schönborn , the official seat of the US embassy in Prague.

Aster amellus' Dr. Otto Petschek '

Otto Petschek employed an army of gardeners and landscapers to design the green areas of the originally two- hectare property. Most of the garden was laid out before the villa was completed. Petschek also largely drafted these plans himself. For this purpose, he undertook study trips around the world, visited numerous botanical gardens and was in professional exchange with leading international botanists . The plants were selected and procured in close cooperation with the Späth'schen Nursery . The venerable company based in Berlin-Treptow procured rare and exquisite botanical plants for him from different continents and delivered thousands of trees, plants and saplings to Prague.

A large number of exquisite and already very old trees came with special transports from England and overseas, which required huge amounts of water for the new planting. The beds were decorated with 5000 tulips, 3000 hyacinths and numerous other flowers. Two of the original four huge greenhouses for tropical plants, including orchids , have been preserved. The Späth tree nursery also assisted on site with its own landscape architects, master gardeners and engineers. In the process Otto Petschek developed from a buyer to a creator.

His passion for exquisite plants - and his financial expenses for them - were so remarkable that he had the Späth'schen nurseries breed a new variety of mountain aster for the garden of the villa , the "Aster amellus' Dr. Otto Petschek '", colloquially today as the summer master' Dr. Otto Petschek ' . The perennial was later grown commercially by various gardeners, including Karl Foerster and AC van der Schoot, and was sold worldwide by 1931 at the latest.

literature

  • Norman Eisen: The Last Palace of Prague. A legendary house and the storms of the 20th century. Propylaea Verlag, 2020.

Web links

Commons : Pictures of the Villa Otto Petschek  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Villa Petschek - Background and Context Iowa State University, accessed August 10, 2020.
  2. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick - A corporate history from the German Empire to the Federal Republic . Wallstein, 2007, p. 392 f.
  3. ↑ Helena Krejčová, Mario Vlček: Výkupné za život. V Šenově u Ostravy, nakl. Tilia, 2009. pp. 334 f.
  4. ↑ Petr Štěrba: Rodina Petschků: Čeští Rothschildové? (1. část). Univerzity Karlovy, November 15, 2017. finmag from June 9, 2008, accessed on August 17, 2020.
  5. ↑ a b Ambassador’s Residence US Embassy in The Czech Republic, accessed on August 10, 2020.
  6. ↑ Nová smlouva START river made a US Ruskou federací podepsána v Praze US State Department, accessed on 18 August 2020th
  7. ↑ Petr Urlich u. a .: Slavné vily Prahy 6 - Bubeneč Praha. Foibos, 2017, ISBN 978-8087073995 , pp. 29-31.
  8. ↑ Eva Škvárová: Nábytkářská company Emil Gerstel Prague a její spolupráce s architekty. (Dissertation) Univerzita Karlova v Praze Filosofická fakulta Ústav pro dějiny umění, 2015, p. 20.
  9. ↑ a b c d e Norman Eisen: The Last Palace. Europe's Extraordinary Century Through Five Lives and One House in Prague. Hachette UK, 2018.
  10. ↑ Petschek Palais Prague City Tourism, accessed on August 18, 2020.
  11. ↑ Uhlobaron v milionové vile šetřil na bazénu Epochalnisvet, accessed on August 18, 2020.
  12. ↑ Petschek & Co. Books Discovered Once Again, accessed on May 15, 2020.
  13. ↑ Karel Kratochvil: Bankéři. Praha Nakladatelelství politické literatury, 1962, pp. 140 f.
  14. ↑ Asters - early risers and late bloomer gardeners, accessed on August 7, 2020.
  15. ^ Gerd Krüssmann, Wilfried Siebler, Willi Tangermann: Winter hardy garden shrubs. Parey, 1970, p. 25.
  16. ^ Société linnéenne de Lyon (ed.): Bulletin mensuel de la Société linnéenne de Lyon, volumes 41-42. Publications de la Société Linnéenne de Lyon, 1932, p. LXIX.

Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 1.7 ″  N , 14 ° 24 ′ 19 ″  E