1903
A season house, built in eighteen months
The owner was a Prague wine merchant who had taken the cure here for nine years and decided it would be cheaper to own a house than to keep paying for one. The architect was local and built four others on the same bank.
It opened in May 1903 with thirty-one rooms, a ballroom, a reading room and a card room. The rooms became twenty-nine in 1958 when two were taken for bathrooms, and nothing has changed the count since.
It was nationalised in 1948, run as a trade union sanatorium until 1991, and bought back by the founder's great-grandson in 1994, a story that sounds invented but is documented in the town archive.
Five levels, and what is on each
The 1974 roof
The one piece of the building that is not 1903
A fire in the mansard in 1973 took out the roof over the garden side. The rebuild was done in 1974 in the materials and the manner of 1974, which is to say a flat-faced window wall in aluminium.
Restoring it to the original would have been possible in 1994, and the house decided against it. The argument, which it still finds persuasive, was that pretending the fire had never happened would make the rest of the building less believable.
House rules
Five things worth knowing
- Breakfast is served in the ballroom from seven to ten and is not brought to rooms.
- The spa is for house guests only. The town has asked about opening it up, and the answer is still no.
- Children are welcome anywhere except the gaming room, at any hour.
- The ballroom is let about forty times a year, and on those days breakfast moves to the reading room.
- Rooms are held on a name and a telephone number. Nothing is paid through this website.