Villa of the builder Josef Jarcovják

On the corner of Kvítková and Lešetín II streets stands an elegant villa that the Zlín builder Josef Jarcovják built for himself and his family. He was born in Slušovice on September 17, 1891, as one of seven siblings, into the family of Františka and František Jarcovják. In 1919 he married Marie Janáčková, the daughter of an important Zlín family. Josef Jarcovják had a registered construction business and at that time was only the second builder in Zlín after Josef Winkler, with whom he ran a joint construction company for several years. In the Zlín construction boom in the First Republic era, his business prospered and by the beginning of World War II he had built 200 buildings. The purchase contract for the land is dated September 11, 1919, and Jarcovják's wife Marie Jarcovjáková is mentioned in the documents as the owner of the property. Construction of the villa began in August 1920, and on November 22, 1921, the new building was approved.

The building has three floors, including an attic covered with a mansard roof with several dormers. The ground floor served mainly representative functions with rooms for relaxation and for guests. In addition, there was a kitchen and a maid's room downstairs. Upstairs were rooms for family and guests, but also a dining room. Both living floors are connected by a decorative oak staircase, which continues into the attic with three rooms and an entrance to the attic storage space. An open staircase hall runs through the entire interior of the house. The building has a basement under the whole layout. The building used traditional bricks, and the ceilings of the living floors consist of wooden beams covered with wooden boards, with reed mat plastering on the underside. Only the basement has partly reinforced concrete prefabricated parts and a monolithic slab, housing a laundry room and a solid fuel boiler room.

The architectural language of the house can hardly be compared to anything else in the context of Zlín. We could see it as a more moderate regional paraphrase of Czech architectural cubism, thanks to the regular articulation of mass through the use of sharp edges, the graduation of pilaster strips around the windows, a distinctive dormer on the west side, and a detail of the outdoor metal railing. These forms have been preserved to this day; only the mural, probably with a landscape motif, disappeared from one of the fields of the western façade.

The only alteration took place in the1920s, when the existing wooden veranda was turned into a room, the roof of which became a terrace, and a room and an external staircase were added to the original rear entrance from today's parking area from Lešetín II Street. In addition, a larger brick greenhouse was built near the villa in 1923. The separate northern part of the large plot of land was occupied mainly by the construction yard of Jarcovják's company, but there were also stables or smaller buildings with rental apartments.

Originally, the villa served as one residential unit on two floors. In the post-war period, however, it was partially divided into two apartments on the ground and first floors, still inhabited by the Jarcovják family, as well as one room and a studio apartment in the attic for rent. After repeated negotiations with the city regarding the sale of the property, when the establishment of a kindergarten or nursery was considered there, in 1987, it was finally sold. The buyer was Agropodnik Gottwaldov, seeking suitable premises for its promotion and scientific and technical development department. The last construction modifications of the villa took place in 1995, when it became the property of the current owner and became the seat of a company trading in computer technology.

The building was reconstructed according to the project of Pavel Šiška from the S.M.S design office. It was planned very sensitively, with only minor adjustments. The villa is considered an exceptional example of quality "pre-Baťa" architecture in Zlín, without major inappropriate modifications and with a large degree of preserved original elements and details. For example, architecturally high-quality parts of the interior have been preserved, especially the central wooden staircase with coffered panelling. Original elements, such as casement windows and fittings, have been re-used - sometimes exact copies had to be created. The attic is illuminated by dormers of the same shape as the original ones. A more significant intervention was the demolition, relocation, and reassembling of a slightly later ground-floor extension of today's main entrance from the parking lot, and the removal of the gate in the fence at the original corner entrance to the house from Kvítková Street, where the stained glass still remains. 

 

 

MK