After €5.9M+ restoration, the popular tourist attraction reopens for public after two years on March 6. Don’t miss “the most beautiful interior room in modern architecture”.

Admission tickets to villa Tugendhat tours need to be booked online. It’s quite easy and there is still no big husle. That may be because Brno City Museum set the price quite high.

There are two kinds of tours: standard one for CZK 300 (180) and a “technical” tour for CZK 350 (210), which gives you chance to see the formerly unaccessible facilities in the building, like the laundry room and the dark room (which is more interesting than it seems). Family ticket are available for CZK 690 (standard) and CZK 805 (technical). If you want only see the garden, you may buy the ticket at the place – but info on price is not available yet.

Villa Tugendhat was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built between 1928 and 1930 for Fritz Tugendhat and his wife Greta. Sadly, they had to escape Czechoslovakia in 1938 and have never come back since.

It is a breathtaking, heart-calming piece of modern architecture. I love the living room, with the famous onyx wall, large open space and huge windows that make you believe the house is actually sailing above Brno, towards the cathedral.

The building was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001.

Take a look inside (the video shows the villa before its restoration):

The reopening got covered by The Guradian: read the article and visit the gallery.

One of the Tugendhats’ daughters, Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, works as a professor of art history at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

“For me, this is actually the most beautiful interior room in modern architecture,” she said. “Usually, it’s only in old churches that a room has such a meditative effect.”

Černá Pole (“black fields”) neighborhood is a part of Brno-sever district and offers a high quality of living. It is located close to the centre but most of its streets are quiet.

There are some great pubs and you can tell your friends that you live close to Villa Tugendhat, the UNESCO World Heritage Site. Way cool.

If you have enough money, buy a villa or a house there. Otherwise, why not to rent a small flat in Černá Pole?

A typical street of Černá Pole with tenements built in the 20th century.

Pros

• One of the most beautiful residential quarters of Brno.
• Many shopping facilities.
• Great restaurants and pubs.
• There are several masterpieces of modern architecture: Vila Tugendhat, Café Era etc.

Cons

• Parking issuses. Ask your landlord about parking in a court yard.
• The rents are slightly above average, but still afordable.

Semi-detached houses near Mendel University.

Best restaurants and pubs

Betlém (27 Krkoškova st.) is not only the best restaurant in Černá Pole, it is one of the best restaurants in Brno, thanks to delicious meals based on the traditional Czech cuisine, great Dalešické beer, nice interior and above-average waiters. It offers the best fried potato chips in Brno.

U Lasa (110 Merhautova st.) is one of the few tap-your-own-beer pubs in Brno. A good thing is they close as late as at 2 a.m., a bad thing is that the quality of the beer (Starobrno) went down during last year.

Hluchá zmije (34 Jugoslávská st.) is an almost legendary pub with less known Czech beers on tap (Polička or Dudák anyone?).

U žíznivé opice (46 Merhautova st.) is a swinging wine bar, popular among students and other alternative souls. Speaking of alternative places: Traubka (8 Traubova st.) and Mýdlo (3 Traubova st.) are among the most important hubs of alternative culture in Brno.

Map

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One of the most famous moravian cafés of the pre-war era and also a jewel of the functionalist architecture of Brno, café Era, will be renovated at last. Luboš Ptáček, who bought the ruin in 2002, wants to have new café Era opened again until the end of 2009.

One of the three floors will be dedicated to an exposition of the pre-war modernist architecture of Brno. The price of the project has already got over CZK 10,000,000 (€375,000). New Era will be probably mantained by Studio 19, an association managing several cafés.

The café was designed by a famous architect Josef Kranz and was built in 1929. It has been decaying since 1959, when the communist regime nationalized the building and transformed it into a pub. Era is located in quater Černá pole, near the Villa Tugendhat, a masterpiece of the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. GPS: 49°12’38.051″N, 16°37’8.806″E.

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Source: Brněnský deník. Source of the picture: Archinet.