Veszter Gábor: Villas in Budapest. From the compromise of 1867 to the beginning of World War II - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1997)

class villa. They were single-storey and their plans did not obey any formal set of rules; central axis and symmetry were not apparent in their architecture. Ground plans mirrored the demands of necessity and given physical circumstances such as the shape and size of the building plot as well as the practical needs of their proprietors. These initially small buildings were eventually enlarged, an operation not particularly difficult as their original design allowed for transformation - there was simply no obstacle to further addition, as their conception and balance could not be easily upset.

Examples from Budapest show that in the 1870s-80s the middle-class intelligentsia was fond of detached single-storey family houses, and that privacy was maybe even more important in their eyes than social entertaining. Their choice was of course probably also influenced by fairly favourable conditions attached to building credits and the fact that it was well worth starting to build a house in a new residential area, such as in the vicinity of Andrássy út, in view of the tax concessions such an enterprise enjoyed. However, family houses erected in areas where villas were in the majority could not keep pace with rapidly rising land prices, and they mostly disappeared in the following three decades, to be replaced by highly lucrative rent-yielding buildings. The disappearance, between 1900 and 1912, of five houses designed, for most, by Antal Platzer (who later changed his name into Palóczy) and built between 1876 and 1879 on the block of plots bounded by Délibáb utca, Bajza utca, Benczúr utca and Munkácsy utca, was only one example of this trend.

The first middle-class villas in Budapest- THE NEO-RENAISSANCE RESIDENTIAL AREA of Andrássy út and its surroundings

Middle-class villas of higher standards than simple family houses, but definitely more modest than the urban mansions of the aristocracy are a type of building characterising the period of bourgeois emergence. Linking their widespread appearance with the flourishing of great enterprises is not an exaggeration since, although we have no reliable (numerical) comparative data, the publications issued in recent years all demonstrate that important numbers of villas used as high-quality, all-year12