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

The napraforgó utca villas viewed from the Ördögárok brook in 1931. From the left: Nos. 11, 13 and 15.

(László Vágó, György Masirevich Jr., Pál Ligeti & Farkas Molnár)

storey villa designed by Károly Weichinger, the largest a three-storey villa realised by Péter Kaffka. (All the other houses had two floors.) The basic arrangement of the flats followed the general design of European detached houses - living room, kitchen, larder and laundry on the ground floor, bedrooms and bathroom upstairs. Variation resided in leaving the living space undivided or by articulating it into two or three premises (lounge, dining room and hall). This system contrasted with the traditional practice established in Hungary for half a century; the service rooms had been displaced from basement to ground floor. It is worth noting that the plans of ultraconservative Gyula Wälder and those of the ultra-avant- gardist pair Pál Ligeti and Farkas Molnár were not as different as might have been expected in view of their very diverging conceptions and the outer appearance of their projects. Yet one difference between was still fundamental - while the Ligeti-Molnár team or József Fischer were able to include all the necessary requirements on a floor space of between sixty and seventy square metres, Wälder still needed ninety to do the same.

It is interesting to note that an element which had only been considered earlier for large villas, namely a split- level living room enabling fuller and bolder exploitation of space, was adopted in two of the houses. In László Vágó’s (Hapraforgó utca 13, today No. 11) a single-flight staircase starting in the living room led to a first-floor corridor, half of which formed a gallery/breakfast room

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