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

Detail of Dezső Malonyay’s villa. The building repeatedly underwent transformation, it is today one of the residential buildings owned by the German Embassy.

XIV, Izsó utca 5

rich man and he did not dispose of sufficient funds for the building of a house. So he had to take on enormous loans and he included a flat intended to be let in his villa. There were two apartments above the basement in his three-storey house - a seven-room one for rent on the ground floor, with service rooms in the basement, and Malonyay’s own apartment on the first and second floors. Everything in Malonyay’s split-level apartment, even the arrangement of rooms, showed that it was designed to be the setting of an unusual life-style. On the first floor, public and private spheres were carefully kept apart; study and library were shielded from everyday bustle by being placed on the second floor, as they were not part of entertaining, but were intended to fulfil their basic function. The library, or “Studio” as it was called, with its pictures above the bookshelves, its objets d’art and its items of applied arts, was not only used by the master of the house as a working room, it also served as a parlour and gained exclusivity by its very situation suggesting that only a fortunate and carefully selected few were allowed to step into it. The hall, the living room and the

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