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

touch to the house as a whole that is particularly striking when compared to other buildings designed by Aladár Arkay.

Árkay also made the plans of a villa very similar in organisation, apart from the hall being only single-storey, for Károly Baróthy, an engineer with the city council (Bulyovszky utca 7; 1901-02 - demolished). The two buildings were, however, quite different from the outside, the fagade of the Baróthy Villa being well-balanced, with a regular repetition of windows, a few ceramic tiles augmenting the plaster and a hipped roof.

Arkay further developed the conception of the Baróthy Villa a decade later for the villas that were to be built in the so-called Judges’ and Prosecutors’ estate.

Systematic building of a residential villa area in Buda - the Judges’ and Public Prosecutors’ district on Kis- SvÁBHEGY 1911-13

Typical of 19th-century Buda were summer residencies situated in the middle of great parks or vineyards. Members of the middle class or the aristocracy interested in the building or acquisition of a villa still preferred Pest, until the construction of bridges over the Danube suddenly enabled the linking of the left and the right bank. Margaret Bridge opened access to the Rózsadomb, while the new Franz Josef Bridge (Szabadság Bridge) put the slopes of Gellért Hill within much easier reach. The vineyards destroyed by the epidemic of philoxera were not planted again, but were parcelled instead. This was the starting point of a general tendency seen throughout the 20th century. Since that time most villas have been built in Buda, on the right bank of the Danube.

Housing and construction regulations for the residential area of Buda prescribed a minimum plot of 3500-2000 square metres as a general rule, but the minimum allowed on the areas of Naphegy, Rézmál, the Városmajor end of Kis-Svábhegy and the part of Gellért Hill near Fehérvári (Bartók Béla) út was fixed at 1000 square metres.

In 1913, Dr. Dezső Márkus, a Supreme Court judge and member of the association which had initiated the first programmed building of villas, reported on the inauguration of a new villa district in two architectural journals (Magyar Építőművészet and Építő Ipar) as follows:

24