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

drawing room probably served as everyday reception rooms. The asymmetrical building was divided into two parts; the two-storey right side with its “hipped roof of bikali houses” was broken by numerous large openings, while the almost closed ground and first floors of the narrower, left side were surmounted by a roof terrace framed by a pergola.

Building a villa was an enterprise too expensive for a member of the intellectual middle class, even after the beginning of the 20th century. Malonyay worked and published a lot in that time, but building a house still turned out to be beyond his means. He was forced to sell his house barely two and half years after moving into it. His villa was of course transformed by the new owner.

Dezső Bayer’s villa (No. 8 Gyopár, today Minerva utca) was built on the side of Gellért Hill in 1905-06 after plans by Guido Hoepfner and Géza Györgyi. The seventy- square-metre, split-level hall is surrounded by an L- shape body composed, on the first floor, by reception rooms, and on the second by rooms pertaining to the private sphere. The interior of the villa was as luxurious as that of the Strasser Villa built ten years earlier in Délibáb utca, but the style of its exterior was different. Features strongly contrasting with the conservative His- toricism of the latter (such as varying window shapes, and huge and very unsettled roof constructions) characterised this new example of middle-class grandeur, influenced in its design by the so-called Wilhelmite architecture popular in Berlin in the last decade of the 19th century. (Many fugitives were hidden in the cellar of this villa by Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues during the winter of 1944-45.)

Late Secession upper-middle-class villas

The Malonyay Villa was built to suit its owner’s personal needs as prescribed by the so-called English style. Another outstanding turn-of-the-century creation, the Schiffer Villa (Munkácsy Mihály utca 19, József Vágó, 1911-12) was influenced by the detached elegance of Josef Hoffmann. Its owner, Miksa Schiffer, quite unlike the immensely rich building contractor Hermann Ba- bocsay who was particularly proud of the colourful appearance of his house, was mainly interested in the high degree of privacy his own offered. The Schiffer Villa, des33