The restored First Republic furniture returns to the apartment on Hlinky Street in Brno

Brno – The restored furniture is returning to the architecturally valuable apartment of the Herdan couple in Brno-Hlinky, which belongs to the Brno-střed district. Students from the Brno Higher Vocational School of Restoration worked on the restoration. After installing the First Republic furniture, the town hall plans to wallpaper the apartment and refurbish its stone elements. All work is expected to be completed by spring, after which the district will open the spaces to the public. This was stated today in a press release by Brno-střed councilor Martin Drdla (ANO).

The restoration of the furniture from the 1930s has been underway at the school since 2022. The work has now moved from professional workshops directly into the reconstructed apartment. Since the beginning of last week, students have been placing the restored pieces back in their original locations under the supervision of historian and curator Radek Ryšánek. Built-in wardrobes and wooden paneling are returning to five rooms, for example. The actual assembly is challenging; the original furniture was custom-made, so all parts must fit together precisely. According to Ryšánek, the furniture serves as evidence of Brno's golden era.

Around 60 people, including preservationists, have been involved in saving the functionalist interior, which hardly anyone knew about until 2020. After the restoration is completed, Brno-střed will open the apartment to the public, for example, for guided tours, exhibitions, significant social gatherings, or chamber concerts. "We are also negotiating with the Museum of the City of Brno about lending additional period furniture and accessories so that the interior of the apartment resembles the original state as much as possible,” added Mayor Vojtěch Mencl (ODS).

The house on Hlinky was owned during the First Republic by Jewish merchant Eugen Teltscher and his wife Elsa. Their daughter Johanna married Richard Herdan in 1933, an engineer and head of the export department of Škodovy závody for South America. The bride's father presumably had the apartment newly furnished and gifted it to the newlyweds. The Herdans moved abroad for work in 1938, thus escaping the Holocaust. Teltscher later briefly rented the apartment, after which the Nazis seized the house, and the owners perished in concentration camps.

After the war, tenants lived in the apartment. The last moved out in 2016, and the apartment was then uninhabited. The built-in furniture and overall layout of the space remained almost unchanged.