This is the latest instalment of The Inside Story, Wallpaper’s series spotlighting intriguing, innovative and industry-leading interior design.
Oblouková 171 in Žatec is a building that almost wasn't. The Czech townhouse sheltered the same family for four decades before falling into serious neglect – and now emerges as one of the most compelling restoration projects in recent memory.
The story begins in the 1920s, when the current owners' great-great-grandparents settled in the town. Successive generations lived there until the Velvet Revolution, after which the house fell into disuse. By the time it passed to its current owners as an inheritance, it was barely standing. The roof leaked, ceilings were caving in, entire sections of the roof truss were missing and dry rot had spread through the structure.
The inheritors, as it happened, were architects – Jan and Barbora Hora of Ora – and they saw potential where others might have seen a write-off. When they discovered a spot in the attic where the family had hidden moonshine behind a beam, their minds were made up: the house had to be saved.
The renovation took eight years, and was predictably gruelling. Steel tie rods were used to brace the entire building; a collapsed vault was rebuilt; and a concrete slab replaced a ceiling so waterlogged it had sprouted a destructive fungus large enough, as the owners put it, to fill a skillet. Most demanding of all was the three-tiered hop-drying attic – a structure typical of Žatec and its hop-growing heritage – which required specialist craftsmen to restore.
From the outset, salvage and reuse were guiding principles. The owners had spent years collecting reclaimed materials – old floor tiles, handmade bricks, antique beams – and Oblouková 171 finally gave them a home. Rotten ceiling joists were replaced with hand-hewn beams sourced from a demolished house 400 kilometres away; red marble tiles were rescued from a skip; courtyard paving came from Šatov tiles that had sat in a barn for a century. The result is something of a Frankenstein house – a patchwork of parts gathered far and wide, stitched together with care and conviction.
Recreate the mood
Where new elements were unavoidable, they were handled with utmost taste. Custom ash-wood doors reinterpret traditional panelled designs; new windows faithfully match the profiles of the originals. The street façade was the thorniest problem: stripped of its detailing in the 1990s, it required historical photographs just to establish what had been lost. The architects then chose reinterpretation over reproduction, restoring the underlying geometry while simplifying the ornament. The result, with its pretty pastel symmetry, looks like something out of a Wes Anderson film.
The completed building now functions as guest apartments, a family holiday retreat and a taproom serving craft beer from a local brewery, which is fitting: Žatec – recently inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage List – built its identity on hops. Oblouková 171 now raises a glass to that legacy while adding a new chapter of its own.
