Villa Otto, Cultural monument villa in Zbraslav, Czech Republic.
Villa Otto is a three-storey Art Nouveau summer house with a mansard roof, built 1909–1911 on a long garden plot reaching the Vltava navigation path. Its west facade has an entrance under a vaulted arcade; the south facade carries a terrace with a pergola, linked to a second terrace on the east, where a wide stair leads down to the garden. Inside, a two-storey columned hall fills the ground floor, with the dining room facing the garden and the kitchen in the basement.
Jan Otto, publisher of the Czech encyclopedia, had his family summer in Zbraslav from 1873. In 1909, aged 68, he commissioned architect Otakar Novotný to build this villa, completed 1909–1911. The family sold it in 1920; the state acquired it in 1935, and from the 1950s it served as a railway school. It burned out under socialism, was protected as a monument in 1991, restored by the Borenstein couple from 1995, and flooded in 2002.
Jan Otto's family had summered in Zbraslav since 1873, and in 1909, aged 68, he had this villa built near the Vltava. The interior kept separate ladies' and gentlemen's rooms on the ground floor, with bedrooms on the first floor and in the attic. The house later served as a railway apprentices' school from the 1950s.
The villa stands on a long garden plot whose eastern end once reached the navigation path along the Vltava, near today's Závodu míru bridge. It is privately owned by the Prague-Zbraslav district and is not open for guided tours; the 2002 flood reached the ground-floor level. View the exterior from the street and riverside path.
Jan Otto, who commissioned the villa at 68, commuted daily by carriage from Prague and usually arrived only in the evening. The 2002 floods reached the ground-floor floorboards. The building has belonged to the Prague-Zbraslav district since 1995, when the Borenstein couple from Belgium restored it.
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