An early-century villa in Mariánské Lázně: a house we taught to speak more quietly

Brief and constraints

235 m² on three floors, a villa from the beginning of the last century under a red terracotta roof. The house stood empty, layered with traces of previous lives: walls so crooked you couldn't simply glue a moulding onto them; tired parquet; historic doors and frames, still beautiful but long non-functional; electrics that had to be replaced entirely.

We left the layout unchanged. Not a single wall demolished, not a single new opening — the whole project lives within what was already there.

The challenge: connect the history of the façade with modern minimalism inside — without stylisation and without a break.

Main idea

An early-century house rewritten in a modern language.

Solutions

The starting point

The fireplace hall has a tiled stove whose chimney runs through the whole house to the top. Glossy ceramics in the Czech tradition could be neither removed nor replicated, so they defined everything else. The ground-floor palette grew around them: cashmere fronts, light beige and sand, the deep walnut of the floor. The second anchor is the stained glass in the living room bay window, the only one inside the spaces we designed.

Zoning without walls

Large, flowing spaces easily feel empty, and the main work here was not to fill them but to divide them without closing anything off. The living room holds four scenarios at once: storage, a corner with yoga and fitness equipment, a seating area with a TV, and the bay window with a round table where you retreat when you want to be alone for a while. The boundaries are drawn with light and material. The same principle connects the second route — the fireplace hall flows into the dining room, the dining room into the kitchen with a bar counter and ceramic worktops.

Light in three layers

Originally there was little of it, and it wasn't thought through. In the living room, fireplace hall and kitchen we created two-level ceilings with hidden lighting and then layered the scenes: functional light, decorative light — furniture backlighting, contour lines — and separately wall lights and chandeliers with an Art Deco touch. Everything switches on in parts or all at once, and in the evening the house can be recomposed with a few switches. Mouldings, cornices and skirting boards keep the classic line; built-in furniture in a minimalist language reaches the ceiling and joins it with the same moulding — so the two styles stop arguing.

The rescued floor

Until the last moment it was unclear whether the historic parquet would survive — and what it would cost. We sanded it, treated it with glazes and stains, brought it to a deep walnut tone, and then matched the ceramics by the fireplace to it. The joints with the restored door frames were handled by hand: perfect joints don't exist in a hundred-year-old house, and it's better to accept that than to fight it.

The attic as a story of its own

Forty-two square metres under the sloped roof are the master of the house's territory. A gaming screen, a desk, a guitar corner, a lounger right under the ridge, where you can no longer stand, only lie and look up. The slope is backlit with many colour-changing scenes. The client gave this floor to her husband as a gift six months after the main part was handed over — and commissioned it as a separate project.