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

round residences had been built in Germany in the 1830s, a period characterised, on the territories of the Habsburg empire, by the building of summer villas.

One of the prerequisites of the spread of urban villas was the existence, within the city limits and not very far from the centre, of a suitable area (such as the Tiergarten sector in Berlin, which has almost completely disappeared since). The importance of this factor decreased significantly by the turn of the century as a result of the development of transport, or, to be more precise, the progressive annexation of more distant territories to the city.

At the time of the first town planning programme of Budapest in 1870, thirty parcels situated on the outer section of the newly opened Avenue (named later And- rássy út), and fifty in its immediate surroundings (not far away from the villa district created at the beginning of the 19th century around Városliget) were specifically allocated as building plots for villas. The main villa districts in Buda (Rózsadomb and the southern slope of Gellért Hill), which emerged at the turn of the century, were formed spontaneously with the support of the building authorities.

Closeness to nature is hardly a feature characteristic to the mostly neo-Renaissance, historical villas. They are usually surrounded by a garden, but it seems as if their creators did not attach great importance to it. Gardens were light-heartedly sacrificed for the building of additional and annex buildings, servant quarters, cart-sheds and stables. In addition, plots were often divided in later years to allow the construction of further villas. In brief, historical villas did not stand in the garden, they overwhelmed it. Most of them had high foundations; the kitchen and service premises, as well as the domestics’ rooms were located in the semi-subterranean basement (the gardener and the coachman were given accommodation in the annexes). The actual living rooms were situated on the mezzanine and on the first floor. These villas usually had balconies, and loggias were not unusual, although verandas were not as popular as they had been in earlier decades. You did not go out into the garden, you went down to it. Nineteenth-century mansions also rarely had large gardens - they were usually surrounded by only as much courtyard as was absolutely necessary.

Gardens surrounding urban villas were mainly intend13