Münz Villa

The villa for the director of the Czech Union Bank, Eduard Münz, is the first in a series of houses on the slopes of Pisárky, designed by Ernst Wiesner for wealthy Jewish clients. Here, Wiesner already employed his typical division of the house’s layout into two wings with different functional purposes.
The house is built on an L-shaped plan in the south-sloping garden. The northern entrance courtyard is defined by operational facilities and a service wing, while the living rooms are oriented towards the garden. The individual floors are also functionally divided: the basement contained rooms for staff, the ground floor and the first floor housed family spaces, and the second floor was reserved for guest rooms and a spacious rooftop terrace. The mass of the building is reduced to a set of three simple volumes that follow the slope's topography. Their horizontality was originally disrupted by prominent lines of continuous chimneys. No reports of the original appearance of the villa's interior have survived; the only preserved element is the stucco decoration in the music salon on the first floor, consisting of decorative cornices and mirrors. Some furnishings were destroyed during an insensitive renovation carried out in the 1980s by the General Directorate of Agricultural Buildings, which was using the villa at that time.
The villa originally belonged to the Czech Union Bank in Prague, from which the Münz couple purchased the house. However, Eduard Münz died in 1940, and his wife was deported during the war to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. In 1941, the villa was taken over by the Emigration Fund for Bohemia and Moravia, and after the war, it was nationalized. Sons Heinz and Peter Münz, who served in the Czechoslovak foreign army, returned to Czechoslovakia after the war, and the house was returned to them for a short time. In 1951, half of the villa was owned by the Ministry of Finance of the CSSR, and then by the housing administration of the City National Committee in Brno.