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

ed to shield the privacy of their owners, even if this kind of demarcation remained symbolic (the strip of garden separating neighbouring houses was rarely wider than six to ten metres).

The villa district around Andrássy út introduced unprecedented architectural standards to Budapest. Partly because prices shot up rapidly as the neighbourhood in question was part of the newly regulated inner district, and maybe also because a transition was needed between the earlier development in unbroken rows and the area of Városliget, the dimensions of the plots were rather modest - up to 1400 square metres on Andrássy út and less than a thousand in the side streets. (Three plots measuring more than 1700 square metres formed an exception.) The buildings erected on these allotments, which were much smaller than earlier building plots for villas, were clearly designed to serve as all-year-round residences. They had many living rooms and service premises, and were fully equipped. They were, without any doubt, middle-class villas.

The room standing at the geometrical centre of the Villa Rosa in Dresden, designed in 1838 by Gottfried Semper and considered to be the prototype of bourgeois villa, was octagonal and covered by a segmented cupola, just like Palladio’s Villa Rotunda. This room did not serve as a corridor, there were neither stairs in it, nor an upstairs gallery; it merely had four small balconies which played a part much more decorative than functional. This early Semper Villa was among the first to exemplify the experimental adaptation of a Renaissance model of spatial configuration. The spatial articulations were later fitted to suit the needs of middle-class life-style, instead of following the mathematically defined Renaissance archetype. (Typically Renaissance features were gradually reserved exclusively for the outer appearance of buildings. They still included, for a time, the ground plan, before being finally confined solely to the design of the faqade, as the restrictions of the style were gradually perceived as too demanding.) The ground floor of the Villa Rosa included an entrance hall, a conservatory, a dining room, a drawing room and attendant offices. On the first floor the antechamber and the card room were flanked on both sides by living rooms and bedrooms, seven altogether. The kitchen and the service rooms were all situated in the basement.

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