“...and when I was in Prague, my dear Bohuslav Fuchs found out about it, looked for me, found me and said: “We were talking to my friend Štěpánek about how nice it would be to build you a cottage! And Bohuslav Fuchs told me how he would make drawings and plans for my cottage, and I said: “why not! then make me some kind of plan” ^[1]. This is how the prominent writer, publisher and priest Jakub Deml (1878–1961) described the beginnings of the construction of his house in his controversially received book My Testimony about Otokar Březin, where he describes in detail all the other rather complicated circumstances preceding the velvet construction, i.e. the purchase of land and financing. His close friend and mentor, the poet Otokar Březina (1868–1929), helped him with both, and when choosing the land he said: “ You can’t find anything more beautiful, just build here. You have the sun here all day, a stream nearby, a spring of water on the hillside and a forest in the background…”. Březina gave Deml a savings book with ten thousand crowns for the construction, and the construction of the house was also financed by Deml’s “collaborator” and “co-builder” Pavla Kytlicová. Deml was also helped with the financing of the construction by his “friend, architect Fuchs”, who was looking for possibilities for state subsidies. Bohuslav Fuchs knew Deml from the association of Slavic-minded artists “Koliba”. The architect designed a house for the rural environment of Deml’s native Tasovo in the spirit of the Czech “national style”, a house with stylized decorative elements based on the traditions and colors of folk architecture. Deml himself called it a “Wallachian cottage”, although it was a building in the modernist spirit.

For the young architect, who after his first engagement in the studio of his professor Jan Kotěra, together with Josef Štěpánek founded his own architectural practice, it was his first independent commission. Deml reported on the completion of the building in a letter to Otokar Březin in June 1922. The house of the poet and also writer and publisher Pavla Kytlicová (1874–1932) became a meeting place for the Czech literary community. Jakub Deml lived here until his death. The house, which is very well preserved, is today a privately owned immovable cultural monument.