Bedřich and Marie Bouda's house

The inconspicuous house in the austere purist style represents one of the two preserved Jihlava buildings designed by the renowned Brno architect Bohuslav Fuchs. It was designed in 1935, on the edge of the still sparsely populated road leading to Pelhřimov, for the railway inspector Bedřich Bouda and his family after he had moved from Telč to Jihlava to work with the railways. He probably made contact with the architect through his neighbour, the director of the Jihlava Hospital, Vítězslav Horn, who already knew of Fuchs through his friends from Brno and the Sokol organisation. In the same year, Bohuslav Fuchs designed the Jihlava Sokol House. For the needs of the four-member Bouda family, the architect designed a stylishly austere and fully functional three-storey house surrounded by a garden, as well as interior furnishings. The sloping terrain of the plot required a vertical arrangement of the living areas, which were well-lit and oriented towards the garden. The whole house was built by the Třešť builder Jan Podzimek and completed in October 1936. It is still preserved in an almost intact condition with many valuable details in the interior.

The simple cubic structure with scratched and coloured plaster in a light yellow shade was broken by the originally green painted windows and the large French windows illuminating the corridors, while the staircases were fitted with steel tubular railings. From the south-west, the main living room on the ground floor opened through a large window and door onto a terrace into the garden, which was screened by a glass curtain wall on the neighbour's side. Within a single generous space, the living room also included a dining area, which was connected to the adjacent kitchen by a serving hatch integrated into a built-in cabinet with a glass cupboard for dishes and cutlery. Upstairs, two children's rooms, the parents' bedroom, and a bathroom equipped with a bidet were efficiently arranged. The semi-sunken basement provided space for a garage, a staircase with the main entrance from the street, the laundry, boiler room, and food storage. In the individual rooms, the interior still features selected walls painted according to the architect's colour design – grey in the living room, yellow in the hallway, blue in the parents' bedroom, and green in the children's room. Fuchs also designed the interior furniture layout, and some pieces of furniture were made by Bouda himself. Some pieces of the original furnishings are still preserved, such as the circular glass and brass luminaires, built-in wooden wardrobes and a bookcase, sofas, armchairs, internal doors with fittings, a double-sided writing desk, and a piano. The flooring is formed of square wooden parquet blocks in the living room and grey rubber on the staircase. A small, distinctive legacy characterising the architect's style can be seen in the small round window in the northern façade, which does not feature any other windows apart from that one. The Boudas had to leave the house for a while during the German occupation as it was used by another German family. They returned after the war and their descendants still live in the house today.

JL