On the edge of the then Žižkov district, close to a busy road where the town was gradually merging into the surrounding countryside, a villa of architectural note was built on a spacious plot in 1923. The building was for Josef Kuna, a teacher at the Czech minority school in Mírovka and later at the boys’ primary school of the second district in Brod. At the time of the villa’s construction, he was also a member of the municipal library council; a few years later, in 1933, he served on the committee for the erection of a statue of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. The town chronicle also notes that he gave a lecture on the sculptor Jan Štursa shortly before the opening of Štursa’s exhibition in Německý Brod.

The project was developed in 1922 by the Prague architect Jindřich Freiwald (1890–1945), a pupil of Jan Kotěra, in collaboration with the builder Jaroslav Böhm (1880–1961). During the villa’s construction, minor modifications were made—most notably the addition of a projecting bay window intended to bring more light into the living spaces. The villa was completed in March 1923. Funding was provided through state support under Act No. 281/1919 Coll., which offered favourable loans for so-called ‘small apartments’ built by municipalities, districts, or housing cooperatives.

In parallel to their architectural work, Freiwald and Böhm offered standardized family houses—rationally designed, catalogue-style buildings that combined affordability with modern comfort. These were constructed between 1920 and 1921 in the garden colony at Ořechovka in Prague, and between 1921 and 1923 in the cooperative colony Na Pernikářce in Smíchov.

It can therefore be assumed that Josef Kuna visited the residential colony at Ořechovka and decided to approach the architects for future collaboration. This is also suggested by the fact that, for Kuna’s project, Freiwald designed a “small henhouse and hut” in the far corner of the plot.

The pragmatic choice of a standard house from Freiwald’s portfolio undoubtedly offered Kuna a high level of residential comfort and architectural quality at an affordable price, as well as the assurance that the design would meet the requirements for a state subsidy.

The building reflects the lingering aesthetics of Rondocubism—the ‘national style’—characterized by the red-and-white colour scheme of the facade, where exposed brick harmoniously contrasts with white plaster. At the same time, the influence of Kotěra’s modernism is evident, expressed in the clear volumetric composition, sharp edges and a restrained, austere elegance. 

Within the local context, it was an exceptional, almost visionary building. While the surrounding development remained traditional, Kuna’s family house brought a trace of Prague’s avant-garde of the early 1920s to Německý (Havlíčkův) Brod. It did not, however, inspire direct successors and remained a solitary example—a testament that even on the periphery, the spirit of modern architecture could assert itself, embodied in the courage of a single teacher and his ability to make the best use of ‘state subsidies’.