Mr and Mrs Nekol's mill and house

The mill and house on Sokolovská Street in the then still independent village of Bedřichov near Jihlava was built in 1934 for Viktor and Božena Nekol. The couple apparently moved to Bedřichov in order to run the mill and bakery. They commissioned the architect and builder Rudolf Janko from Bedřichov to draw up the plans. He was known more as an architect of houses in a rather traditionalist spirit, several of which he built along the long Sokolovská Street intersecting the village.

Here, Janko designed a functionalist brick building with pale plaster divided into two distinct formations and compositions – a three-storey residential part made up of horizontal strips and a four-storey mill, which in contrast is composed vertically. The differentiation in the internal functions of the two parts can also be observed in the use of different types of windows and the loggias. Janko united these two parts into an architectural whole using a central staircase avant-corps, where both crown cornices and the stone landing lead.

The separate mill was fitted with its own staircase for easier movement of employees around the workplace. The floors were also connected through the individual machines, which were used to gradually process the grain into flour. On the third floor, there was a mill driven by an electric motor, from where the grain was fed through the handling room on the second floor to the rolling mill on the floor below. Here, the grain was crushed by two counter-rotating rollers and dropped below into another mill, where the final flour product was produced. Flour was processed into baked goods directly on the ground floor, which housed a bakery, an oven, and a shop. The residential section only occupied the first and second floors, where Janko placed two differently sized flats with a bedroom, a study, a separate kitchen and dining room, a hallway, sanitary facilities, and a loggia. There was also an office and a couple of separate rooms, presumably for employees.

Viktor Nekol appears in archival documents as the owner of the building until about the first half of the 1950s. After the Second World War, the building was used by the Consumer, Production, and Savings Cooperative (Spotřební, výrobní a úsporné družstvo) in Jihlava Jednota, which operated a bakery there. At that time, two wooden warehouse buildings were added to the property, one of which, located on Sokolovská Street, still exists today. In 1952, Nekol's mill was nationalised and the Jednota cooperative had to hand it over to the newly established Bakeries (Pekárny) national enterprise in Jihlava. The modernisation of the interior for contemporary purposes was probably necessary, as the house underwent many interior modifications at that time, including the installation of a goods lift. Today, the building is rented out and is not open to the public.

LVo