Gábor Eszter: Andrássy Avenue – Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
ed villas of that height became the norm. This section has seen the greatest changes in the past 130 years. As property prices rose it became an extravagance to use plots as gardens in the villa quarter, which was gradually incorporated into the city, and proprietors went as far as regulations allowed them to go in exploiting every square inch available for construction. Thus many extensions and alterations were implemented and many structures were pulled down to give room for new construction. The three-storey mansion at the corner of Bajza utca, which houses the Russian Embassy (No. 104 Andrássy út), is a characteristic example of how extensions were made. The originally two-storey villa, designed in neo-Renaissance style by the renowned Budapest architect Antal Weber for Count István Erdődy (1813 —96) in 1877, was raised on a 763-square-fathom site created through the consolidation of three adjacent plots. With its three-arcaded loggias framed by two windows on the sides, the main front of the villa overlooked Sugárút. The upstairs loggia was decorated with frescos by Károly Lotz. In 1894, Count Erdődy sold the villa to László Semsey (1869—1943), a young man about to get married. Semsey found the by then somewhat old-fashioned villa too small and modest, which is why he commissioned Arthur Meinig, a well-liked architect of Hungary's aristocracy, to enlarge and convert the villa. On the Bajza utca side, he attached an auxiliary wing to the existing structure. He replaced the modest double-flight stairs with a spacious staircase, opened two of the simple downstairs rooms into one another, to which he joined the ground-floor loggia whose apertures he covered with glass panes. The walls of the resulting hall were then given carved wooden panelling. László Semsey, who had been created a count in the meantime, himself sold the property in 1909, to the young, newly married Countess László Széchenyi, née Gladys Vanderbilt. The history of the marriage ran the customary course of the union of title and wealth, in that the bankrupt and deeply indebted young count went to America and wedded the daughter, characterised as a kind and modest person by Mihály Károlyi, of the multi-millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt. (As a precaution, the wealthy family bought the property meant to be the newly-weds' Budapest home for the young bride.) By American standards, the villa proved to be far too small even after its enlargement, which is why the family had a distant relative, the renowned New York architect Ernst Flagg, redesign the building. Flagg tripled the combined floor space of the mansion, turned the newly created, broad main front towards Bajza utca, added a second floor to the existing ones and built in the entire attic. He created a banqueting hall, which occupied the entire length of the Andrássy út front to which he joined the glassed-in upstairs loggia. (That was, in all likelihood, when Lotz's frescos were destroyed.) The new mansion was built over the original villa, as 45
