The Semler Residence

The interior is part of the 3rd tour route:
The Semler Residence

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Oskar Semler and his family first lived on Jagellovská Street, not far from today’s Klatovská Street, where they originally planned to move into the family home and company headquarters at Klatovská 19. Of course, this would require a significant renovation of this home as well as an addition of two new floors. The designer of this bold extension was none other than Adolf Loos, and his drawings still survive to this day at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. In the end, however, Oskar opted for another solution, that being the purchase of the original townhouse at Klatovská 110. In 1932, he asked Adolf Loos to execute a grandiose adaptation of an entire wing of the home at Klatovská 110, transforming it into an apartment. However, due to Loos’ poor health and subsequent death, his disciple and co-creator, architect Heinrich Kulka, assumed the project. Oskar and his family moved into the new residence in 1934.

This is the only apartment in Loos’ style in Pilsen that applies the unique principle known as “Raumplan” – the individual rooms in the apartment are of various heights, having been elevated to several different levels and interconnected by stairs to create continuously adjoined spaces. Thus, in the apartment, we can admire the Raumplan principle with the spacious lounge and its cladding of Finnish birch, the flooring made of rare Makassar ebony, and the fireplace of clinkstone blocks. When leaving the lounge, we find a library with red-painted ceiling beams and a gilding decking. Many details have survived to this day, including the dumbwaiter, used to transport food from the kitchen to the individual rooms at their varying height levels. The apartment is divided into a social area and the carefully separated private rooms, namely the bedrooms and children’s rooms on the upper floor. Thanks to a recently completed renovation project, these spaces too are accessible to the public.

In 2012, the home was handed over by the City of Pilsen to the Pilsen Region and subsequently placed in the care of the Gallery of West Bohemia. Since 2013, this expansive property has undergone three renovation phases, before finally opening its doors to the public in September 2022. The newly-built Centre for Research of Pilsen Region Architecture is now part of the Oskar Semler residence exposition.