Tenement Houses for the City of Zlín

The application for a building permit for a new block of rental houses designed on a plot parallel to Stalinova třída (today třída Tomáše Bati) in the eastern part of the city was filed in May 1948. A residential block consisting of six houses completed the development, which during the first two-year plan (1947–1948) was determined by five tower houses and the Morýs houses by Miroslav Drofa and terraced three-storey houses by Vladimír Karfík. 

It is Karfík's three-storey apartments that the new free-standing block related to.  Unlike the Karfík houses however, the new block contained shops and bachelor apartments on the ground floor, with standard flats on the floors above. The new block provided the growing neighbourhood with basic civic amenities. The authorship of the project is not clear from the planning documentation, but the applicant for the construction was the local national committee.

The block of two-storey houses is orientated north-south. The main façade faces the street with the entrances to each of the buildings. Unlike the surrounding buildings, the block is plastered. The textured plaster of the façades is enlivened by strips of windows in the stairwells punctuated by relief house signs (similar to Karfík's three-storey houses). 

The ground floor is covered with a wide projecting cornice along the entire length of the house. All business units have generous display windows, with storage and other facilities in the basement. The façade is further divided by deep loggias with subtle railings and a brick cornice; face bricks are also used as a decorative element under the loggias. According to the plans, the railing fillings were to be made of concrete perforated prefabs, similar to the opposite tower houses. In the end, however, the prefab railings were not implemented and textured plaster was used instead. 

Each of the houses offers six apartments, two on each floor. The total area of one apartment on the upper floors is 60.67 m2. On the ground floor, next to the shops, smaller bachelor apartments with two rooms and a common bathroom were located. All apartment units on the first and second floors are two-bedroom ones. From the kitchen, which faces the street, one can enter the loggia. The kitchen includes a built-in wardrobe and a pantry. The living room and bedroom face the courtyard, and the bedrooms are provided with a smaller balcony. The apartments are lit from two sides. The individual floors are connected by a U-shaped terrazzo staircase.

The apartment building was handed over to the tenants for use in 1950. According to a report from 1974, mostly young families with almost sixty children in total under the age of 15 moved into the 36 apartments. During this time, a playground was built in the courtyard, which was used by families with children. By the mid-1970s, the composition of the tenants and their needs had changed; there were mostly retired people living in the former bachelor apartments, and others complained about noise and dust not only from the main street, but also from the courtyard. Today, the playground is no longer there and the immediate surroundings of the house have changed with the construction of three-storey residential buildings on the eastern edge of the area. The house has remained in almost original form with many original features such as stone reliefs. Some apartments have original wooden windows, but most of them have been replaced with plastic ones. The building is insulated from the sides, unfortunately large advertisements were placed on them. The ground floor with shops still fulfils its function, as an example the post office has operated there for a long time, and from the 1970s also grocery shops.