Veszter Gábor: Villas in Budapest. From the compromise of 1867 to the beginning of World War II - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1997)
er words if the until then strictly separated dining room, parlour and drawing room could be unified into one large living space. These villas were worth more than average detached houses because their proportions had been carefully thought through, which also implied the more unfortunate feature of being inappropriate for extension, untouchable from an aesthetic point of view. In the course of the following decades, once the regulations stipulated by the Budapest Board of Public Works had fallen into oblivion, and necessity turned out to be stronger than order, some of the villas were indeed extended. Terraces were turned into rooms and garages were added. These endeavours harmed the unity of the street much more than any similar operation does when performed in an area of detached houses built in conformity with a more adaptable general conception. The modern villas of the thirties - European standards Some of the architects who participated to the realisation of the Napraforgó utca project, such as Lajos Kozma, Farkas Molnár and József Fischer later played, during the thirties, an important if not determining part in the development of residential areas in Buda. Lajos Kozma spent the first twenty years of his professional carrier working in applied arts, despite the fact that he had been trained as an architect. He later designed the plans for a cinema, an exhibition pavilion, and blocks of flats, but he really acquired a name by designing villas. His activity as industrial artist influenced the totality of his later work (one of the points his detractors criticised); characteristic of his designs were carefully elaborated details and a strong taste for the ornamental. Kozma’s clients were mostly well-to-do members of the middle class, so he had the opportunity to create spacious villas with lofty dimensions. The villa of building contractor Ernő Havas (Ruszti utca 8/B) presents, on the one 'hand, an almost totally closed fagade to the street, the front being broken only by the narrow vertical window of the staircase and the horizontal openings of the ground floor service rooms. The garden faqade, on the other hand, widely opens onto the garden. The huge opened and closed terraces, the winter garden with its three glass walls, the rows of four-winged windows were 50
