About the site
Dolní schody Street, running uphill from Nádražní Street (now Janská) to Boženy Němcové Street and ending at Tyrš Stadium, was only laid out in 1929, as one of the last streets of the newly developing villa district on Kylešovský Hill. Although located on the very edge of this neighbourhood, it had a highly advantageous position close to Opava East railway station. At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, several houses were built here that bore the hallmarks of functionalism and New Objectivity: cubic forms, austere façades without decoration, flat roofs, ribbon windows, and terraces. The two-storey house no. 1718 was one of the first in the street, commissioned in 1929 by leather goods manufacturer Josef Vilner and his wife Josefina from the Czech construction firm of Julius Vysloužil.
The simple cubic mass with a flat roof is enlivened by a contrasting cylindrical stair tower on the north façade and by the stepped-back second floor, which occupies only part of the ground plan and opens onto a spacious south-facing terrace with tubular metal railings. In the most recent renovation (2006–2007), architects Tomáš Bindr and Zuzana Halfarová of the Opava-based Atelier 38 balanced the building’s austerity with a striking colour scheme. Combining grey and orange rectangular fields, they referenced the Dutch avant-garde movement De Stijl, which rejected traditional architecture and its forms in favour of large orthogonal fields of colour. The house has a two-tract layout, with living rooms oriented to the south and service areas to the north.
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