Villa Gans (Budapest), preliminary plans of the basement and the living quarters

The Museum of Applied Arts holds several versions of the design of this villa with two storeys (one being a basement), built in the middle of an irregularly shaped and sloping plot of land on Szemlő Hill in Buda, at a distance from the street. The plot now holds three multi-family houses, with only designs and photos of Kozma’s house surviving.
Like the Szegő villa, built two years earlier, it had an enclosed cube-shaped volume. This enclosed quality was tempered with an airily delicate roofed terrace on the northern elevation, and the main entrance on the southern front, which was recessed into the wall.
Since the plot offers a northern view, Kozma could not follow the principles he laid out in several of his writings: he was prevented from placing the living room in the southern section of the house, with windows towards the view and access to the garden, and dedicate the northern section to the kitchen, the hall, the bathroom and other subordinate rooms. The sketches consequently bear evidence to an exciting series of experiments in which Kozma tried to both lure the southern sunlight into the living room and open it up to the northern view.
Of the designs held at the Museum of Applied Arts, the earliest sketch is dated April 1940. The same sheet bears four elevations of a three-storey building, the three floor plans, and the east-west section, including the staircase. In this version, Kozma organized the space as it was his wont: the living room, the scene of family life, is situated on the ground floor, as are the hall, a windowless room, the staircase and the rooms connected to the kitchen, while the bedrooms and the bathroom are upstairs. The basement contains the service rooms, the quarters of the resident caretaker (bedroom and kitchen), and a hobby workshop. On the northern front, a terrace is connected to the living room, with stairs leading down into the garden, while on the south, there is a veranda along the entire length of the living room. Upstairs, the master bedroom has vast glass surfaces overlooking a south-facing terrace.
The other designs held at the Museum of Applied Arts, made in June and July 1940, already feature a building with a basement and a single floor. Common to all three floor plans is that the living space of the client’s family is limited to the ground floor, with the service rooms and staff quarters placed in the basement. The layout of the earliest plan is retained, with the living room, whose size varies across the designs, situated on the west side of the house and the bedrooms on the east. Other elements that recur in all three versions include a covered terrace supported by columns, and a veranda, smaller than in the April sketch, and attached, in one version, to the western wall. The layout is different in each design: Kozma varied the size and arrangement of the bedrooms, the staircase that connected the two storeys, as well as the bathroom, and placed the kitchen and the related rooms either in the basement or on the main floor.
The documentation of the version that was eventually built is not in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts. The living room was a space that ran along the western wall, and had a conservatory on its southern end; the northern end comprised two three-leafed glass doors that led on to the terrace. The children shared a larger room, which had two doors on separate walls and windows at some distance from each other, allowing for the later installation of a partition wall. The kitchen was placed in the basement and was connected to a serving area on the ground floor by a dumb waiter. The pantry and the maid’s room were accessible from the kitchen. The staircase that connected the two storeys ran parallel with the corridor that separated the living room from the bedrooms.