The house where two countries were created

By Lilit Marcus, CNN

Brno, Czech Republic (CNN) — From the street, it doesn’t look like anything special.

Most tourists trying to find this UNESCO World Heritage site are usually looking for a grand European classical villa, so they often walk right past what they think is just a typical family home in a quiet Czech neighborhood.

But this deceptively humble house is studied by architects and historians around the world.

It has been a private residence, a dance studio, a recovery center for women with osteological conditions, a property owned by the Nazi Germany and the location for a major 20th century historical event.

Welcome to Villa Tugendhat.

The history of a house

In the 1920s, the Tugendhats, a wealthy German Jewish family, hired an up-and-coming architect named Mies van der Rohe — widely credited with popularizing the phrase “less is more” — to design their home in Brno.

It was completed in 1930, shortly before Hitler rose to power in Germany.

And all of those lost tourists can take comfort in the fact that Van der Rohe intended for the house to blend in with the neighborhood.

To truly see what’s special about the villa, you need to view it from the back. It was built on the top of a small hill, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows that gave residents an uninterrupted view of the grassy landscape.

“(Van der Rohe) was, despite his very bourgeois appearance, a radical thinker,” says Dietrich Neumann, who teaches the history of architecture at Brown University. “He radically rethought the way people might want to live.”

At the time, most family houses were comprised of a series of boxy rooms with express purposes: one for cooking, one for sleeping, etc. But the Villa Tugendhat has large, shared spaces made of novel-for-the-time materials like white onyx. (A single wall of onyx would cost about $60,000 in today’s money.)

“You just flow between the rooms, and that was very antithetical to the German idea that you had to have closed cozy spaces inside,” says Michael Lambek.

Lambek’s mother Hanna was the only child of matriarch Grete Tugendhat’s first marriage and spent her early years living in the villa. Lambek grew up in Canada and published the book “Behind the Glass: The Villa Tugendhat and Its Family” in 2022.

“There was nothing left to chance,” he says about the home’s design.

“The house does not rest on its walls. It rests on steel pillars that have chrome wrapped around them. And the walls, at least on one side of the house, were replaced by windows. It was the first house to have plate glass, wall-to-wall, or ceiling-to-floor windows.”

Throughout the house, Van der Rohe and his collaborator Lilly Reich designed custom furniture that fit with the villa’s modern aesthetic. Two pieces were so iconic they became known as “the Brno chair” and “the Tugendhat chair” and are still produced under license today.

Rather than hanging up family portraits, fine art or ornate tapestries as many wealthy families did at the time, the Tugendhats opted to keep the interiors minimalist.

The glass windows provided not only lots of natural light but a look at the changing landscapes, while a large section of one floor has an indoor winter garden.

Neumann calls this concept “radical emptiness.”

“There was no inherited furniture from the parents,” he says. “There were no paintings on the walls. There were no Persian rugs that you brought from some exotic trip. There’s almost no belongings that are there to show off your personal history or your sentimental memories.”

The afterlife

Due to World War II and its aftereffects, the villa was only used as a family home for a short time.

The Tugendhats began to feel the waves of anti-Semitism growing in Europe and fled to Venezuela. The villa, as one of the largest properties in Brno, was seized by Nazi Germany. Later, after Brno was liberated by the Russians, the home passed through multiple owners and uses until the 1960s, when the family was able to return to Brno.

After the war, the Tugendhats settled in Switzerland and Czechoslovakia fell into the Soviet sphere of influence. Grete Tugendhat was able to visit the villa again during the brief break from Soviet control during the Prague Spring, before it was crushed in August 1968 when the Soviet Union and its allies invaded. Grete Tugendhat agreed to give up her ownership claim to the home under two conditions: it be restored to its original condition, and it be open to the public. The city of Brno said yes.

In the meantime, Van der Rohe had emigrated to the United States and become one of the most famous architects in the world. He designed Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC, the Seagram Building in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

The restoration work at Villa Tugendhat was slow and careful. In the decades between the war and the villa’s reopening as a tourist attraction, the Czech government used it as a “hospitality center,” hosting foreign dignitaries.

But its most famous historical happening took place with relatively little fanfare.

On August 26, 1992, two men, Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar, walked into the Villa Tugendhat.

That day, the two leaders agreed to split Czechoslovakia into two countries: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Brno, located roughly midway between Prague and Bratislava, was chosen as a symbolic location.

In the Villa Tugendhat garden, in what is now referred to as “the meeting under the tree,” the two men addressed reporters and announced that the two countries would be split as of January 1, 1993.

The peaceful separation, which did not involve any battles or bloodshed, is called the Velvet Divorce.

In 2001, UNESCO nadded the Villa Tugendhat to the World Heritage List, citing it as a “a pioneering work of modern 20th century residential architecture.”

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