Czech Design Heritage

The Czech Republic has produced some of the most significant interior spaces in European design history. From the ornate Art Nouveau apartments of early twentieth-century Prague to the radical functionalist villas of Brno, Czech designers and architects have consistently pushed the boundaries of what a living space can be.

Art Nouveau: The Ornamental Age

At the turn of the twentieth century, Prague embraced Art Nouveau with extraordinary enthusiasm. The movement, known in Czech as secese, transformed the city's apartment buildings, hotels and public spaces into celebrations of organic form and decorative craft.

Alfons Mucha, the most internationally celebrated Czech artist of the period, defined a visual language of flowing lines, botanical motifs and idealised female figures. His influence extended beyond poster art into interior decoration, furniture and textiles. The Mucha Suite at the Smetana Hotel in Prague preserves the atmosphere of this era — rich fabrics, gilded surfaces and carefully composed arrangements of furniture and art.

Art Nouveau interiors were not simply decorative. They expressed a belief that beauty should be woven into everyday life, that the home should be a total work of art in which every detail — from the door handles to the ceiling plasterwork — contributed to a unified aesthetic experience.

The Czech Art Nouveau was not an imitation of Paris or Vienna. It had its own character, rooted in Slavic folk tradition and expressed through a distinctly Czech sensibility.

Czech Cubism: A Unique Contribution

Between 1910 and 1925, Czech architects and designers developed a movement unique in the world: Czech Cubism. While Cubism in France remained primarily a movement in painting, in Bohemia it extended to architecture, furniture and interior design.

Czech Cubist furniture — chairs, tables, cabinets — is characterised by angular, crystalline forms that seem to fracture light and create dynamic visual tension. These pieces were not merely functional objects but three-dimensional sculptures intended to activate the space around them.

The House of the Black Madonna in Prague, designed by Josef Gočár in 1912, contains the only Cubist café in the world. Its interior demonstrates how Cubist principles could be applied to a complete interior environment, creating a space that feels simultaneously historical and radically modern.

Functionalism: The Czech Modern Movement

The founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918 coincided with the rise of functionalism — the most influential design movement in Czech history. Inspired by the Bauhaus in Germany and the ideas of Le Corbusier, Czech functionalists believed that architecture and interior design should serve human needs directly, without historical ornament or unnecessary decoration.

Brno became the capital of Czech functionalism. The city's wealthy industrialists commissioned a series of remarkable villas that remain among the finest examples of modernist domestic architecture in Europe:

• Vila Tugendhat (1930, Mies van der Rohe) — UNESCO World Heritage Site, with its famous onyx wall and open plan living area
• Vila Löw-Beer (1930, Ernst Wiesner) — a refined example of functionalist domestic design
• Vila Stiassni (1929, Ernst Wiesner) — elegant interiors combining functionalist planning with high-quality materials

These villas were not cold or austere. They were designed for comfortable, modern living — with carefully considered natural light, integrated storage, and furniture designed specifically for each space.

The Löw-Beer Villa: Functionalism with Warmth

The Vila Löw-Beer in Brno's Černá Pole district offers a particularly instructive example of how functionalist interiors could be both principled and welcoming. Designed by Ernst Wiesner in 1930, the villa combines the clean lines and open planning of functionalism with warm materials — wood panelling, woven textiles, carefully chosen art — that give the spaces a human scale and intimacy.

Lessons for Contemporary Interiors

The Czech design heritage offers several enduring lessons for anyone furnishing a home today:

• Quality of materials matters more than quantity of objects
• Natural light is the most important element of any interior
• Furniture should be designed for the space it inhabits, not imported from a catalogue
• Decoration should arise from the nature of materials, not be applied as an afterthought
• A home should reflect the life lived in it, not aspire to an imaginary ideal

These principles, developed in the early twentieth century, remain as relevant as ever for anyone seeking to create a living space that is genuinely beautiful and genuinely useful.

Last updated: 21 February 2026