Vila Jana Antonína Bati, Modernist villa in Zlín, Czech Republic.
Vila Jana Antonína Bati is a one-storey villa of red jointed brickwork with white brick used to frame the window parapets, lintels and the cornice, built on a 12 × 12 m plan. A full-height bay projects from the south facade, and a 1931 extension enlarged the plan to 17 × 12 m. The garage stands separately below the sloping ground by the road.
Jan Antonín Baťa applied for a building permit with plans on 15 September 1926, and the permit was issued on 18 October; the villa was completed in November 1927. The architect František Lydie Gahura, a friend of Baťa and an employee of the Baťa company, was not named on the project because Tomáš Baťa opposed his brother's plan to build a private house. Gahura returned in 1931 to design an extension, and in 1937 Vladimír Karfík moved the main entrance to the west facade. The villa was confiscated from Marie Baťová in 1947 and adapted for Czechoslovak Radio in 1951.
Since 1951 the villa has housed Czech Radio Zlín, which altered the interior and bricked up some openings. Near the entrance hangs a memorial plaque made for the 120th anniversary of Jan Antonín Baťa's birth by sculptor Ondřej Oliva of Velehrad, with Baťa's shoes imprinted in it.
The villa stands on Osvoboditelů Street at No. 187, on a large plot above the Catholic church of Saints Philip and James. The garage is built separately below the sloping ground right by the road, and the entrance leads from the street up an open staircase beside it, past a landing on the garage roof, to a vestibule on the east side.
The villa's garage was built separately below the sloping ground right by the road, and the entrance stair rose past a landing on its roof. A swinging window on the west facade was atypical for the period. A memorial plaque at the entrance, made by sculptor Ondřej Oliva of Velehrad for Baťa's 120th birth anniversary, carries imprints of Baťa's shoes.
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