Gábor Eszter: Andrássy Avenue – Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
The adjacent building (No. 103 Andrássy út) was owned, from 1885, by Ferenc Hopp. It had been built a few years earlier, in 1877, by the Schubert and Hickisch company for private detective József Knorr. Ferenc Hopp was the head and then the owner of the optical instruments firm Calderoni, a wealthy man, passionate traveller and compulsive collector of art objects from east Asia. In his will he left his collection, together with his villa, to the Hungarian state for it to establish a museum of east Asian art. The villa has preserved most of its original form except that Hopp added a room to each floor in 1906 to accommodate his collection. One of the few giving on two streets to this day, the garden also survives in its original form together with the outhouses imported and erected by Hopp. All this is today occupied by the Ferenc Hopp Museum of East Asian Art, the original collection of which has been extended. The first rented villa of Andrássy út was built in 1880 on the plot at No. 105 to designs by Rezső Ray, an architect who had moved from Switzerland to Budapest, where he settled down. Ray bought the 462-square-fathom plot, which opened on two streets, from the Municipal Board of Public Works for 11,362 forints. That the unit price of less than 25 forints per square fathom was a mere twentieth of the amount paid by Saxlehner is in part explained by the 48 ■ The Ferenc Hopp Villa (No. 103 Andráóóy út)
