Born in Brtnice/Pirnitz, Moravia, in 1870, Josef Hoffmann remained attached to the place of his birth until after World War II. After his parents died in 1907, he refurnished the building in which he had been born—a Baroque town house in the main square of the town—as a summer residence for himself and his sisters. The changes comprised a rearrangement of his parents’ surviving late-Biedermeier household goods and template-based wall decorations as well as wooden décor and furniture additions after Hoffmann’s designs for the Wiener Werkstätte. When refurbishing the house, the architect used his parents’ home as an experimental arena for his design ideas. In 1911, Hoffmann dedicated a contribution to the magazine Das Interieur to his parental home.

After the house had been confiscated in 1945, it was used by the local authorities, ultimately as the town library. After the MAK exhibition Der barocke Hoffmann (Hoffmann as a Baroque Artist, 1992), which presented designs and objects by Josef Hoffmann in the Czech Republic again for the first time, plans for the restoration of the building were made which encompassed the reconstruction of the wall decorations. Since the completion of restoration work in 2004, the interiors of the Muzeum Rodný dům Josefa Hoffmanna have conveyed an idea of the spatial effect Josef Hoffmann desired and of his definition of a modern native style informed by the import of the Wiener Werkstätte, on which he had a decisive influence.

The Josef Hoffmann Museum, situated in the house where the artist was born, is located in Brtnice, Czech Republic and has been run as a joint branch by the Moravian Gallery in Brno and the MAK in Vienna since 2006.

Fotocredits: ©MAK/Mika K