Living the highly expensive life

It was Le Corbusier who famously wrote that ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (‘Une maison est une machine à habiter’). But it was a visit to a masterpiece of his great rival among modernist architects — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — that brought home to me how literally accurate that celebrated aphorism was. His Villa Tugendhat at Brno is one of the great monuments of early modernism. To run smoothly, however, this luxurious dwelling required almost as much machinery as a small ocean-liner.

The building has been restored with rigorous scholarship to look exactly as it did when its first owners, Fritz and Grete Tugendhat, moved in 88 years ago. And as one quickly discovers from the guided tour, their accommodation — though as beautiful as a painting by Mondrian — was similarly bare.

The bedrooms, for example, were constructed from materials of the finest quality, and each chair, handle and light switch refined by Mies to an essence of formal and functional perfection.