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

Modern frontage of a Stühmer shop at 1 Kecskeméti utca, V

goods to other Stühmer outlets owned by people from outside the firm. By the end of the 1930s, the number of its Budapest outlets had reached fifty. The name of the firm became known abroad and it had branches in Vienna, Berlin and Paris. In 1928 the firm turned into a share company whose shareholders were members of the Stühmer family. It was then that the company had a new, six-storey building constructed, housing both the headquarters and the factory, on the family’s plot in Szentkirályi utca. The architect was Ferenc Kende. The building ingeniously accommodating the needs of the administrative work and those of the manufacturing process was provided with an elegant faqade covered with stone, with profiled stone frames and with imitation Art Deco reliefs above the apertures on the ground floor. In 1929 the Ödön Lechner Society honoured the architectural merits of the Stühmer headquarters by awarding it the Lechner medal. The main shop of the company was at the central axis of the building. its frontage is worthy of our attention. It was built symmetrically in the stone-framed aperture with a recessed wooden door in the middle, a bent glass shop window on either side and a base made of glass concrete to give light to the basement. A sign saying Stühmer in metal letters was fixed onto the smoked glass surface above the door and was complemented by the coat-of-arms of the company showing an angel and a crown, all carved from stone similarly to the stone frame above which it was placed.

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