The gardens of the Brno villas Tugendhat and Löw-Beer will be connected for free starting Saturday.

Brno - The gardens of the Tugendhat and Löw-Beer villas in Brno will be linked for visitors free of charge starting Saturday, April 1, for one year. Access to the Tugendhat villa garden had previously been charged at 50 crowns. Last autumn, the Museum of Brno agreed on this with the trustee of the Löw-Beer villa, and the Museum of the City of Brno, which manages the Tugendhat villa, will implement free access to the connected gardens at the start of the season. This was announced in a press release by the Museum of the City of Brno.

"We will of course carefully monitor and evaluate the operation. The whole project is also a preparation for the connection with the garden of the Arnold Villa, the reconstruction of which will begin in April 2023, with an opening planned for no later than April 2024," stated Zdeněk Šolc, director of the Museum of the City of Brno.

The garden of the Tugendhat villa will be accessible for free daily except Monday from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, and from November to February it will be open from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. In addition, people can also take advantage of the new outdoor tour, which will take them to the terraces of the Tugendhat villa and whose capacities have been significantly increased for this year's summer season. The interior tour routes of the villa are usually sold out several months in advance.

The gardens of both villas once formed a single unit that belonged to the older Löw-Beer villa. The industrialist Alfred Löw-Beer later gifted the upper part of the land to his daughter Greta as a wedding present for her marriage to Fritz Tugendhat. The Tugendhats decided to build their own family villa here and approached the already world-renowned German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. After World War II, the once common garden of both villas was divided into two smaller plots, which were later separated by a fence. In recent years, the gardens have been connected by a turnstile, as while the garden of the Löw-Beer villa was free to access, entry to the garden of the Tugendhat villa was charged.