Original owner
A building plot with a garden in Střešovice was purchased from the Capital
of the City of Prague, on the basis of market contract1, of June 24, 1922, by lawyer of German origin, Mr. JUDr. Eugen Steiner, born December 30, 1885.
Mr. Steiner aproached the architectural studio of Mr. Ernst Mühlstein and Mr. Victor Fürth, located on Prague, Vinohrady, Legerova str. 76, for the architectural design. Building office of the capital of the City Prague issued on March 230, 1928 building permit2, based on their project of a neo-baroque one storey villa. After eight months, on November 14, 1928, the building commission sent permission to „inhabit and use“ the house, with the assigned descriptive number 548, in the, then, U Laboratoře Street.
Due to growing political tension against Jews in Europe in the 1930´s, which was associated with the radicalization of the international political scene and the civic climate, Mr. Steiner decided to emigrate to the United States, during the German occupation, and there he received American citizenship in 1946.
Architect Ernst Mühlstein (1893–1961) graduated from German Technical University in Prague and also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, his profesor was the famous architect and urban planner Jan Kotěra, author of the Faculty of Law in Prague.
One of the most famous building of the Mühlstein-Fürth pair of architects is functionalist villa of the important Prague Jewish businessman Mr. Schück, the owner of the bakery collosus named Odkolek. The villa building has been published frequently in foreign press, as another similiar project in Cortina d´Ampezzo in Italy.
In the following period, architects Mühlstein and Fürth designed a number of commercial buildings (Te-ta Palace in Jungmannova street in Prague).
Both architect left the Czechoslovakia before the war, Ernst Mühlstein than worked under the name Ernst E. Milton in Melbourne, Australia, Victor Fürth was professor of architecture on University of Miami in Ohio. Many of the functionalistic buildings of the Mühlstein-Fürth pair of architects belongs to the golden fund of the Czechoslovak interwar architecture3.
Use of the villa
The villa was confiscated from the original owner, Mr. Steiner, on March 16, 1939, in favor of the German Empire. After the end of the World War was real estate on the basis of Decree No.108/1945 Coll., rewritten under the National Administration. The house was managed by the Housing Company of the Capitol City of Prague and it was subsequently handed over to the Administration of the Services of the Diplomatic Corps in Prague, whose successor organization is today´s Diplomatic Service.
The Residence, which was divided into individual flats after the war, was used to accommodate mainly emloyees of the Ministry of Foreign Affaires, until 1970. Subsequently, the villa was leased for 35 years to the Embassy of the Republic of Poland, and since 2006 to the present, the whole property has been used as its residence by the Embassy of the Kingdom of Morocco.
1 Pozemková kniha, Katastrální obec Střešovice, číslo knihovní vložky: 655, č. j. PU16764/2019-101 ze dne 23. 07. 2019, opis provedl: Pavlína Ryvola
2 Opis oznámení započetí stavby č. j. III-18384/78 z 15. 5. 1928
3 Přemysl Veverka, Dita Dvořáková, Petr Krajči, Zdeněk Lukeš, Slavné pražské vily, str. 106, ISBN: 978-80-87073-01-8
