Moritz Fuhrmann – The Löw-Beer Villa

Moritz Fuhrmann’s plush and faux fur (so-called krymr) factory was founded at 72 Cejl Street in 1872, however, Fuhrmann only bought it in 1895. The whole complex’s most interseting part is undoubtedly the building from 1913, located at the back of the plot towards the Svitava River. While adapting an already finished factory complex that couldn’t fit large ground-floor halls, entrepreneurs and architects would often opt for reinforced concrete structures and multi-storey buildings. Individual floors of these buildings comprised of huge, open spaces divided only by support columns to accommodate spinning and weaving mills.

This was also the case with the Moritz Fuhrmann building, which, despite being purely utilitarian, couldn’t be left without interesting details adorning the forefront, such as the central protruding avant-corps or a triangular tympanum bearing the company name. The bulding’s entire front was divided by large, steel-framed factory windows, lending the building a certain, almost poetic, airiness. Nowadays, the building has been converted for housing, its charming exterior being lost through insensitive alterations, such as replacing the large windows with much smaller window openings or covering the facade with insulation.

Besides the factory, Moritz Fuhrmann also owned a very interesting residential building, unwittingly standing behind the creation of yet another architectural gem. His family villa on Drobný Street (formerly Parkstrasse) at the foothills of the Černé Pole district is a representative Art Nouveau structure, designed by Viennese architect Alexander Neumann and built in 1903. The contemporary press tells us that the villa had four apartments with a total of 14 rooms and 7 cabinets, 3 kitchens, 2 bathrooms and 6 toilets. Its entire layout is organised around a central hall decorated with wooden panelling and a glass, natural light admitting ceiling.

Following Moritz Fuhrmann’s death in 1913, his heirs sold the villa for 290,000 crowns to another textile industrialist, Alfred Löw-Beer, lending it it’s today’s moniker of Villa Löw-Beer. Alfred Löw-Beer gifted the upper part of the land belonging to the villa, together with an unlimited construction budget, to his daughter Greta, married Tugendhat. Thus, this Art Nouveau building, originally Fuhrmann’s villa, eventually contributed to the birth of Villa Tugendhat, one of Brno’s most famous modern architectural monuments.