Studio apartment complexes and apartment hotels in Budapest between the two world wars
In Budapest, between 1920 and 1925, an average of only 1,149 new dwellings were built, while the capital's population continued to grow due to continuous immigration, although not at the turn-of-the-century pace. One of the most significant obstacles to the increase in private developments in the capital, apart from the unstable economic situation, was the system of fixed property circulation introduced during the First World War, then relaxed in the 1920s and abolished from 1933. In parallel with the slow, careful elimination of this system, the state tried to persuade private developers to build flats, especially small flats, by introducing various incentive measures, while the capital also started a major small flat building campaign. First of all, in 1921, Act XXXV exempted new buildings from the housing ordinance, i.e. restored the owners’ free disposal rights over them. In 1923, Act XXXIV on the Promotion of Housing Construction exempted builders from paying a house tax and rental shares, which amounted to 65% of the raw rental income, on buildings and parts of buildings put into habitable condition between 1 January 1924 and 1 November 1926. The legislative power encouraged the construction of so-called public benefit construction projects, especially by dedicated associations and cooperatives, by waiving the corporation tax on the housing units created in the building campaign. Furthermore, a tax amnesty was announced for natural persons who, in the course of a housing construction operation, built a house or invested assets in it that had previously been hidden and exempt from taxation. In addition to the tax relief and amnesty, the State, through the Financial Centre, granted a 60% building loan to builders who built ‘not for commercial purposes but purely to overcome the housing shortage’.
The birth of the first studio apartment houses
The first two studio apartment blocks in Budapest were built almost simultaneously in mid-1926. On the Buda side, in Lágymányos, in Zenta Street near the Technical University, the Új Otthon Társasházszövetkezet (‘New Home Condominium Cooperative’) was the developer, and in Pest, at the junction of Üllői Road and József Boulevard, in Kisfaludy Street, the investor was Gyula Perl and his wife.
In addition to the state loan and tax relief, the construction of the apartment building complex on the plot bounded by Horthy Miklós Road (today: Bartók Béla Road) – Zenta Street – Budafoki Road (the Zenta Street apartment building was also located within this complex) was also helped by a new legal possibility, which had just been opened in 1924: the purchase of one's own home. Act XII of 1924, which introduced the institution of separately registered house parts and condominiums, also involved house owners, builders and future homeowners with smaller capital in the construction of housing. The ‘New Home’ building cooperative also wanted to finance the construction of the studio apartment complex on the large plot of land in Lágymányos, bounded by Horthy Miklós Road – Zenta Street – Budafoki Road, partly from the contributions of future owners.
In February 1925, Baron Emil Petrichevich-Horváth, State Secretary for Housing, gave an interview about the plans for the Lágymányos apartment complex to 8 Órai Újság (‘8 Hour Newspaper’). The State Secretary spoke of a ‘bachelor house’, designed after examples from Buda, England and America, divided into five sections, with a common lounge and restaurant, where the ‘bachelor rooms’ would be sold at a price of forty million crowns each. At the time of the interview, a mortgage loan was still being sought for the realization of the plan, a pledge for the three years until the signatories would pay for part of the rooms in installments.
However, after the publication of the article, the search for a lender did not take long, as five days later Baron Emil Petrichevich-Horváth held a meeting at the Ministry of National Welfare, where he, together with the ‘president of the housing administration’ and the ‘representative of the financial authority’, ‘considered the planned apartment house system to be suitable for alleviating the housing shortage’. Baron Petrichevich-Horváth also offered to approach the Minister of Finance for a state loan to start construction. The plan for the Lágymányos bachelors’ housing project, which had received a lot of press coverage, was met with a mixed reception. In a letter in the Pesti Hírlap, a desperate ‘eligible girl’ called the bachelor’s home an assassination attempt against unmarried women, as it would make lonely bachelor life too pleasant and would eventually become a ‘bachelor farm’ from which single men could no longer be drawn. The journal Magyarság has made fun in a vitriolic article of the bachelor housing project, to be called ‘Ordastanya’ (‘Wolf Den’) rather than ‘Garçon House’, and they proposed a freight elevator that would transport the drunk residents only at dawn, as well as a barber, a loan shark, a morgue and a funeral parlor.
The ‘bachelor house’ ultimately failed, of course, not because of opposition but because of the low number of applicants. The ‘New Home’ Co-operative and the ‘Budafoki út 15-17’ Co-operative then built a group of apartment buildings on the Lágymányos site, partly financed by a state loan and partly by the homeowners' contributions. The building complex, designed by József Fischer of Lágymányos, was a very innovative building of its time, with its meandering, serpentine layout, which meant that the apartment block was full of ‘well-laid out’, sunny, street-facing apartments. The topping out ceremony of the project's first building, at 20-22 Horthy Miklós Road, was already reported in the press in the autumn of 1925. The buildings at 17 and 19 Budafoki Road, known as the House of Judges and of Engineers, which were built in a similar construction, half with a state loan (14 billion crowns) and half with a contribution from the owners, and the cooperative-owned studio apartment block at 3 Zenta Street, wedged between them, built with a state loan of 2.4 billion crowns, were handed over less than a year later.
Originally intended exclusively for men, the apartment house was advertised for ‘bachelorettes’ and ‘bachelors’ in the months before its inauguration in September 1926. Located in a block opposite the University of Technology, the building, modeled on the English Boarding House, was furnished with ‘the most modern and comfortable facilities’, with a constant hot water supply and central heating as well as room service; however, the quality of the apartments was surprisingly low compared to other such buildings of the time. The flats consisted of 18 m2 rooms, with no en-suite toilet, bathroom or entrance hall, and were equipped with only a washbasin and tap. The five-storey house consisted of ten bachelor rooms per floor, a ‘service’ room, a shared bathroom and two toilets.
At the same time as the apartment building in Zenta Street, another apartment building (advertised as ‘the first of its kind in Budapest’) was built at the junction of Üllői Road and Ferenc Boulevard, at 5 Kisfaludy Alley – 37 Kisfaludy Street, also with a 2.3 billion crowns state loan for ‘the support of private housing projects’. The clients who commissioned the building were Gyula Perl, owner of the Walla cement factory, and his wife, Lily Günsberger. The apartment building was completed very quickly, probably because of the tax relief available for buildings made habitable until 1 November that year. The builders Bauer and Fischer obtained planning permission for a three-storey tenement house on 31 May 1926, and in the autumn they already advertised the one- and two-bedroom flats with central heating and hot water, of ‘first-class craftsmanship’, which were available for occupation near the Corvin Theatre from November.
Studio apartment buildings converted from office buildings or bath houses
The tax benefits available under Act XXXIV of 1923 for apartments created to alleviate the housing shortage, in addition to the construction of studio apartment buildings, also led to the development of other, very creative combinations of residential buildings in the capital's small housing market. One such example was the office/studio apartment building at 24 Dessewffy Street - 50 Nagymező Street.
In 1922, the Building and Horticultural Corporation (Építési és Kertészeti Rt.) first drew up plans for a five-storey office and residential tenement building on a corner plot, with two large shops with warehouses on the ground floor, offices on the first two floors and five-room apartments (with bathrooms and maids' rooms) on the upper floors. In the second series of plans of February 1924, which were much more restrained, the designers aimed at more economical and cheaper solutions in all elements than the earlier ideas: instead of the original two large shops, eight small shops were drawn on the plans, the caretaker's apartment on the mezzanine floor was relegated to the back yard behind the shops, and the ornate façade was replaced by a simpler one. Complete with an elevator, the building, which grew from five to six storeys, in its final form contained apartments on the first floor, with offices on the other floors, except on the third floor, where a five-room apartment was located. As Béla Székely, architect and master builder, put it in the description of the building submitted in June 1923: ‘The building is intended to house shops on the ground floor and bachelor rooms, and offices on the first floor, and aims to alleviate the housing shortage by providing adequate space for the offices currently occupying the residential premises.’ In practice, this meant that by transforming the office space, arranged on all floors to the same scheme, into studio apartments, a peculiar four-room, or four-flat, mini ‘bachelor house’ was created on the first floor of the building. According to the plans, two doors led from the stairwell to the small apartments on this level. Passing through one of these entrances, the occupants could approach the two separate rooms and the two-room flat via a long hallway (which also opened onto a bathroom with toilet, a separate toilet and a kitchen). Through the other stairwell doorway, a shorter hallway (with access to a toilet) led to a three-bedroom studio apartment. No plans survive of further alterations to 24 Dessewffy Street - 50 Nagymező Street in the 1920s and 1930s, but it is likely that the whole building or further floors were converted into flats, or that the rooms originally intended as offices were rented out as small flats. The house, referred to in all the newspapers as a ‘bachelor house’, was in the papers in December 1934 because of a series of suicides that took place there.
Just as the many small cells of the Dessewffy Street office building allowed for the redesign of one (or later possibly several) floors of the building, another property consisting of several small rooms, the bathhouse at 8 Klauzál Street in District VII, unused since 1920, was also converted into apartments after a change of function. This conversion was certainly no longer motivated by the tax incentives available until the end of 1926. At 8 Klauzál Street, Ignác Salzer had a two-storey tenement house with two- and three-room apartments built in 1894, which was converted into a bathhouse by Dr. Lajos Ringer and Géza Ringer in 1904, as part of the Hungária bath complex, bordered by Dohány, Nyár and Klauzál Streets. In 1927, another two floors were added to the building, and the owner Hungária Fürdő Ltd. probably converted it into a studio apartment house at this time. Unfortunately, only the documentation of the structural calculations for the conversion of the first floor has survived, but not the plans for the remodeling. However, the 1904 planning documents show that the interior layout, with its many small rooms, favored the conversion into studio apartments. On the ground floor of the building there was a large lounge in the middle, with cloakrooms next to it; on the first floor there were dressing rooms, and on the second floor, from the corridors around the common courtyard, bathrooms, medical rooms and servants' rooms opened. The first advertisements for apartments at 8 Klauzál Street appeared in newspapers in September 1927. Until 1930, the apartments were advertised intensively in all major newspapers, while advertisements for housekeepers and maids to clean the bachelor rooms and apartments were also frequently posted.
Studio apartment buildings after 1928
In addition to the alterations, from 1928 onwards, new apartment blocks were also built in Budapest. Following the bachelor houses in Lágymányos and Józsefváros, a third, larger building, with 101 apartments, was built by the Central House Building Company (Központi Házépítő Rt.) at 12 Pannónia Street (now numbered 34), behind the Vígszínház, in the still developing Újlipótváros. The main shareholders of the company were soap manufacturer Jenő Meister, lawyer Dr. Sándor Rosenberg, lawyer Dr. Ödön Perl and bread maker Tivadar Perl, brothers of Gyula Perl, owner of the previously mentioned apartment building in Kisfaludy Street in Józsefváros. In this case, too, the construction work was completed very quickly. The building permit was issued in March 1928 to Emil Bauer, who had also designed the apartment house on Kisfaludy Street. Containing an entrance hall, bathroom and living room, the flats of this house, ‘built on a foreign model’, were advertised from the summer of 1928 with central heating, hot water and gas stoves, at prices ‘in line with the means of intellectuals and officers’, with occupancy on 1 October.
Two blocks away from the Pannónia Street studio apartment building, at the corner of Sziget and Hollán Streets, at 29 Sziget Street, a five-storey apartment building was constructed in 1931-1932 commissioned by the ‘Sziget utca 29’ Tenement House Ltd., based on the plans of Dr. Béla Baráth and Ede Novák. The original plans of the building have not survived, but the address, similar to the apartment building on the corner of Dessewffy and Nagymező Streets, appeared in the newspapers in December 1934 because of a suicide. Newspaper articles unanimously referred to the building as a bachelor house. Additionally, the advertisements for available flats in the building from 1932 onwards, all of which advertised ‘bachelor flats’, ‘small flats’, sometimes with separate entrances (and with bathroom use), also support the assumption that this tenement building may have been a bachelor house.
At the turn of the 1920s and 30s, two new studio apartment buildings were built in Buda. In 1929-1930, six apartment buildings and an apartment hotel with a garçon/bachelor system were commissioned by Count József Mailáth and built at the foot of the Rózsadomb, next to the Central Statistical Office. In 1931, a 40-apartment bachelor house was completed at 74-76 Logodi Street, less than a ten-minute walk from the aforementioned complex, based on the plans of József Porgesz, commissioned by Stílus Építő Rt. The advertisements for the apartment building on Logodi Street, advertised as offering ‘complete hotel comfort, bathroom, entrance hall, central heating and hot water’, also described the social composition of the desired tenants quite precisely. Amongst others, applicants were invited from among ‘members of parliament’, ‘military officers’, ‘landowners’, ‘state ministry officials’, ‘teachers’ and, as with other studio apartment buildings at the time, ‘bachelors’ and ‘bachelorettes’.
In 1931, at the same time as the construction of the Logodi Street apartment house, the Liget Otthon ‘bachelor appartement-house’ was born in the wing of the building at present-day 47 Benczúr Street, vacated after the ‘rationalization’ and merger of the Liget and Park Sanatoriums’ departments. The Liget Sanatorium was built in 1909 by Dr. László Jakab based on the design of his architect brother Dezső Jakab and his partner Marcell Komor, and two years later they also created the Park Sanatorium on the adjacent site at 84/b Aréna (today Dózsa György) Road. The Svábhegy Sanatorium opened in 1927 as the third sanatorium investment of Dr. László Jakab and Liget Sanatorium Ltd. The loans taken out for this and the general economic difficulties had taken their toll on the company, so the merger of the Park and Liget Sanatoriums and the construction of the studio apartment building was a kind of escape, an attempt to avoid bankruptcy.
The recession in the building industry in the first half of the 1930s also had an impact on the construction of studio apartment houses, thus the next one was in Budapest only built in 1935, a decade after the first one in Lágymányos. The four-storey tenement house at 91 Horthy Miklós Road, with a modern façade and, strangely enough, a gable roof, was built by Countess István Teleki. The building, which appears in the telephone directory and in the advertisements for apartments as a bachelor house, had five small apartments of between 20 and 24-25 m2 per floor. On each floor, four apartments shared a bathroom and they each had a balcony. The Teleki apartment building was halfway between a miniature apartment building and a ‘classic’ hotel-style bachelor house. The building's design did not include any service facilities (there was no restaurant or diner, and the apartments of maids or cleaning staff were also missing), but the apartments were advertised with concierge and cleaning service available. The owner of the apartment building was also denied the benefits of the 1934 House Tax Exemption Decree, which gave a huge boost to the building of tenement houses at the time, because of the inadequate sill height and the unusually small courtyard-facing rooms, which were 16-17 m2 on the plans but in reality did not even reach the mandatory size of 15 m2.
A few years after the handover of the Teleki apartment house, in 1938, another apartment hotel with small flats was built in Pest, not far from the Liget Home, on the corner of Munkácsy Mihály Street and Andrássy Avenue, based on the plans of Alfréd Hajós, with 34 one-room and 8 two-room apartments. The boarding-house-style hotel was built by the Boys' Orphanage of the Jewish Community of Pest.
It is interesting that when introducing a new studio apartment house or apartment hotel/boarding house, the advertisements never referred to existing similar buildings in Budapest, but always mentioned foreign examples from the US or England.
By the end of the 1930s, there were almost a dozen newly built or converted studio apartment houses and apartment hotels with small flats in Budapest. In the years following the construction of a few hundred bachelor flats, most of which were handed over between 1926 and 1931, but especially as a result of the house tax exemption decree of 1934, a large number of modern tenement houses were also built with studio flats.
An important change in social norms can be noticed when reading the advertisements in 1926-1927, as this is the first time that a significant change in women's use of space in the city and at home becomes visible. The earlier definitions of ‘bachelor’ in the advertisements for such flats disappear, or are left undefined, with only occupational categories, and often small flats are advertised for both bachelorettes and bachelors. Thus the spaces of the bachelor rooms and studio flats, which were clearly male territory in the late 19th century, and even in the years before the First World War, are now available to women without the risk of losing their good reputation.
Judit Verő-Valló (Translation from Hungarian: Barbara Szij)
(May 2024)
