Take a look inside these modernist cottages – unlikely frontiers for 20th-century design

The Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague is currently home to a special exhibition shining a light on an overlooked but brilliantly quirky corner of the architecture world: the modernist cottage. ‘The Modern Cottage: An Architectural Phenomenon’ documents a little-known yet radical chapter in the history of modern design.

Curated by architectural historian and Wallpaper* writer Adam Štěch, alongside co-curator and architect Jan Bureš, the exhibition turns its attention to cottages and weekend houses as overlooked bastions of modernism – a category of building long neglected in serious architectural discourse, yet one that tells us as much about the 20th century as any grand civic monument.

As European cities recovered during the interwar years and workers gained more leisure time, a new relationship with the countryside emerged. The concept of the seasonal retreat gained momentum, with city dwellers beginning to build holiday homes on the edges of towns, gathering in loosely formed colonies of like-minded nature lovers. This exhibition honours that specific moment in place and time.

Yet ‘The Modern Cottage’ does not succumb to overblown nostalgia. The modernist cottage is not framed as a peculiarly Czech sociological phenomenon, as it so often is in national sentiment – loaded with romantic association. Štěch and Bureš sidestep that framing, choosing instead to examine wide-ranging designs, typologies and architectural ideas by both celebrated and lesser-known architects.

The result connects Czechoslovak examples to wider European design: Alpine cottages reinterpreted through a modernist lens, Scandinavian dwellings, beach houses in the south of France. Across these contexts, the exhibition traces how avant-garde thinking and shifting social structures shaped even the smallest and most informal of buildings.

The material on display is varied. Štěch's own photographs – taken during visits to cottages across the Czech Republic and abroad – form the visual backbone of the show, supplemented by archival publications, period images and architectural plans and sketches. Original furniture from several cottages is also on display, alongside remains of a cottage designed by the artist Zdeněk Pešánek. The exhibition design, created by Matěj Činčera and Jan Kloss, is inspired by a rural landscape.

‘The Modern Cottage’ makes a compelling case that the weekend house was never a footnote to modern architecture – it was where the blueprints of modern life were being drawn.