In 1928, the architect and high-school professor Antonín Tobek, who taught in Prague and Jaroměř and was the father of Gočár's pupil Stanislav Tobek, rebuilt a rural homestead for recreational purposes on the outskirts of the village of Osík, where he was born. The design project for the building, located on the so-called Zmrzlý kopec (Frozen Hill), centred on its inhabitable (western) section and was personally carried out by Antonín Tobek, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
The dilapidated cottage, with two inhabitable, gloomy, ground-floor rooms, was transformed into a new, modern in layout, yet contextual and almost inconspicuous building, which respected local building traditions without, however, drawing to much attention to itself. From the outside, the only clues to its implicit exclusiveness are the generous dimensions of the windows (the house was only used as a summer residence and thus, heat loss was not an issue). The windows featured plate glass and the jambs were faced with engineering brick. This, together with the long, curved attic window, lent the building the air of an English rural homestead.
The comfortable and airy interior included a common area on the ground floor, comprised of two rooms and a spacious stairway hall, and a private area in the loft, comprised of two bedrooms. Antonín's nephew František Tobek, likewise an architect (and designer of the cemetery in Osík), designed a larch-wood, coffered ceiling for the main, ground-floor room and, for the hall, a wooden staircase with a column at its foot with an ornamental capital for a lamp or flowers.
The adjoining land was also subjected to substantial construction work – the slope towards the access road was levelled and shored up (in part with rubble from the demolished cottage). The garden, whose “centre” was a wooden summer-house and an adjoining swimming pool, featured a modern fence with reinforced-concrete framework.
Today, the house which local inhabitants dubbed the “professor's villa”, still retains a range of authentic building features and is currently undergoing sensitive reconstruction work.
