Buza Péter - Gadányi György: Towering Aspirations - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)

18 Hermina út, district XIV

It was in the period leading up to the First World War that the vogue of the domed-turreted townhouse was over. If a few more mansions were still built, reflecting the old-fashioned tastes in the more thickly populated districts of Buda and Pest, they appeared as “weekend houses” to the public and the owner also described them as such. Such a denomination appears on blueprints made by architects Ernő and Arthur Schannen in 1913. The commissioner was Gyula Gyukits Esq., founder-owner of the share company Hungarian Woollen Hood and Hat Factory in Gizella út. According to the local historiography of Zugló he established his firm in the millenary year of 1896. This seems to be contradicted by a record in the municipal directory of Budapest which describes Gyukits as late as 1899 as a journeyman hatter in Ferencváros, and by the fact that his name is not listed among the leaders of the company in that year. However, it is a fact that the hat-makers Gyukits & Co. operated on the premises of the Gizella út hat factory in 1913 and that the firm was indeed owned by Gyula Gyukits Esq. What seems to emerge from all this is that Gyukits had acquired (and in the late thirties still owned), rather than founded the Zugló factory established in 1896, which was, incidentally, the largest hatters business in Budapest.

In any case, the house, handed over by the builder Emil Gerstenberger immediately after the outbreak of World War I, is a monument to Gyukits’ name to this day. This is so not only because his initials are engraved into the glass door of the ornamental stairwell but, mainly, due to the domes above, whose outlines in the shape of different hats allude to the owner’s trade - as if no one should be left in doubt about the origin of the financial sources behind the construction of Gyula Gyukits’ villa by the City Park.

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