This simple grave monument illustrates affluent clients' attraction to modern styles and, by extension, changing ideas of posthumous status representation. The grave's current appearance is the result of a fundamental alteration of an older grave site following the death of Karel Niesner, a commercial councilor and owner of the Jacob's Valley Envelope and Cardboard Factory in the central Bohemian town of Lochovice. Niesner, a former employee of the company, acquired the more than seventy-year-old business following a devastating fire in the late nineteenth century. He subsequently rebuilt, expanded, and modernized it until, prior to the First World War, it was Austria-Hungary's largest company of its kind. In 1915, the Lochovice paper mill produced 1,600 metric tons of cardboard and a million envelopes every day, along with many other paper goods. Following Niesner's death, the company was taken over by his wife and daughters. With the communist takeover in 1948, the factory was nationalized and put under the administration of the West Bohemian Paper Works in Pilsen. In the years up to 1974, the factory gradually switched to the production of binders and index dividers. Until recently, filing and archiving supplies were still being manufactured here under the Korona brand. Today, the factory grounds are known as the Lochovice Technology Park. In 1930, the task of designing Niesner's grave monument was entrusted to Josef Štěpánek (1881–⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠1964), a graduate of Jan Kotěra's School of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts (1919) who also studied at the School of Applied Arts under Josip Plečnik. Štěpánek later designed apartment buildings in Vršovice, Letná, and Pankrác, some of them in a Functionalist style. The modern grave monument works with an austere stylistic vocabulary limited to the use volumes defined by the principle of orthogonality. The polished black granite grave marker was done by the stonemason Jan Rada. It consists of a horizontally-oriented rectangular stele flanked by two rectangular pillars, to which it was originally connected by a metal grille. The overall volumetric composition also includes a simple stepped ledger whose front face is signed arch. Štěpánek –⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Jan Rada and son.