Bedřich Zvach's house

   
After 1924, Jaroslav Dufka, the court architect and builder of the Generally Beneficial Building Cooperative for Rantířov and its surroundings (Obecně prospěšné stavební a bytové družstvo pro Rantířov a okolí), built twenty terraced houses and two detached houses for the cooperative between Jiráskova, Zborovská, Erbenova, and Štursova Streets. In the 1920s, the cooperative focused on building homes for the middle class. All the houses in the newly established community were designed by Jaroslav Dufka, with one exception –the house for Bedřich Zvach, head of the Regional Court office in Jihlava. Zvach probably entrusted the design and construction of his house to František Petráš, a builder from České Budějovice. He was the owner of a successful business, Petráš Brothers (Bratří Petrášové), which had implemented many construction projects in South Bohemia and Prague. The company owned several construction patents, such as"petrášky", hollow bricks filled with reinforcement and concrete, which the company used in the Jihlava building for the perimeter walls and the wall enclosing the property. The use of facing bricks in combination with green painted half-timbering and light coloured plaster gave the gable wall facing the main street a very impressive appearance. The building was officially approved for use in December 1924.

The whole house was divided into two separate two-room flats on the ground floor and the first floor. The attic contained two separate rooms. The building apparently had a problem with heat leakage through the thin walls, which the occupants solved by adding extra internal insulation to the perimeter walls in the following years. Bedřich Zvach and his wife, Emílie, still used the house in the late 1950s, while renting out the other flat and the attic rooms. In 1933, Zvach had a garage built in the garden on the south side of the house according to a project by the builder František Brázda. In 2016, the Pelhřimov architect Jan Kupec from Studio Asensitively repaired the upper shell of the house, including the original colour and material design. In the rear part of the plot, the house was complemented by an extension on the ground floor, which opens onto the garden through large glass window panes.

JL
Literature and other sources 

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