Ferkai András: Shopfronts - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1996)

The Ford showroom (1927) at 12 Kossuth Lajos utca, V

ported from England. The initials B.Ö. and the date 1888, the year in which the firm was established, can be found on the base of the columns beside the entrance from Petőfi Sándor utca. The upper parts of the shop windows are decorated with wood carvings and cut glass. Similarly fine is the screen separating the shop windows from the shopping area. On either side next to the entrance, a small shop window is ended with bent panes of glass and there is a lighting source recessed in the ceiling above the door. The shopfront has one dissonant element - the green glass covering with yellow neon sign on its head. This was made in accordance with the taste of the 1950s and 1960s, in the period of the “Szivárvány áruház” (“Rainbow state department stores”). The interior of the shop is so elegant that we feel as if we were in a Rococo salon where the wainscot, the mirrors, all the furniture, stucco, even the radiator casing and the lighting form an organic part of the Chip- pendaie-style composition. The lavish furnishings were manufactured in the Bernét Fischer & Sons furniture factory.

One shopfront worth mentioning in Kossuth Lajos utca, a street rapidly changing from the mid-1920s, is that of the former Ford showroom. The exclusive representative of the American Ford car factory in Budapest was the firm of Arthur Hahn & Partners, which acquired the two lower storeys of 12 Kossuth Lajos utca for a showroom and offices. László Vágó, the architect making the alterations, planned a unified neo-Classical composition joining the two storeys. Flat pilasters with Ionic capitals divide the fa21