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

In the course of the 19th century’, every town of some importance across Europe witnessed the appearance of two-storey detached houses surrounded by gardens of varying dimensions, built at some distance from the centre, along the shady streets of the newly established green areas. Citizens disposing of adequate means gradually moved to the less intensively urbanised residential sectors, developing in the process a type of building corresponding to their needs and circumstances.

The bourgeois villa which sprung into existence as an architectural genre in its own right was the amalgam of a number of distinctive types of building.

This new kind of living quarters was partly related to that direct descendant of the Classical (Roman) villa, the Renaissance villa, which developed in Italy where it acquired vast popularity and became the country residence of town-dwellers. However, that type of building, even if it did serve as a temporary dwelling, was not really a summer residence, as it principally functioned as the centre of the estate surrounding it. It was situated outside the town, in cultivated countryside, in the middle of open fields stretching as far as the eye could see. Renaissance villas differed from the manor houses built later mainly in their dimensions. Compared to the latter, they were designed to accommodate a smaller household, with fewer servants and rooms, and they were erected on a smaller basic area.

This type of Renaissance dwelling, which developed in the 16th century in Italy where it quickly grew in favour, was unknown in regions further north of the Mediterranean basin because of the different turn taken by historical development. It was a long time before the inhabitants of transalpine towns actually dared moving beyond city walls. The landed nobility lived without luxury on country estates in modest dwellings. Only the aristocracy had the means to build country houses and mansions. Its members usually maintained a country seat on each of their more important lands, and a mansion in some of the nearby towns and in the capital, in the vicinity of the court.

When nature was “discovered” by sentimentalism at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, bourgeois society started to realise that life was also possible outside of city walls. Longing to leave the bustle of life in town for the quiet solitude of the countryside, moving away from

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