Černínská 12 House

The house on Černín Street is a late-classicist storehouse no. 94 / IV, hidden in the northwest part of Hradčan on the corner of Jelení and Černín streets, just north of the famous New World street. It is not a random place - the grounds belong to the historical background of Prague Castle itself and since 1964 the house has been registered as a real-estate cultural monument surrounded by the purchased Lumbe Gardens.

The roots of the site reached into the Middle Ages when it served as a forefront and background of the centre of power of the Czech kings. In the early modern times, there were utility gardens and various economic structures, which Rudolf II himself had built. Later, the land was owned by the Chernín family. Humprecht Jan Černín realized them in an ornamental sense - he ensured the planting of trees, the setting of greenhouses and turned the territory into a lustrous garden corresponding to his social position. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the site was partially fortified - the northwest edge of the gardens was lined with a brick wall of baroque military system, the remains of which have been preserved to this day.

The house itself, as we see it today, originated in the first third of the nineteenth century. The upper terraces of Lumbe gardens have been adapted and termed to this end. In 1852 it was bought by Dr. Josef Tadeáš Lumbe, an influential Prague politician and professor of Prague Polytechnic. For him the house served as an additional residence to his main residence in Malá Strana. Lumbe's name is attached to these gardens inseparably - they have become his domain and part of his agricultural experiments.

The entrance to the house leads through a stylish baroque gate in the wall of the northwest - an element that resembles the more stormy past of this place. In 1925, the Czechoslovak state bought the house and adjacent land from Lumbe's heirs. Since then it has served as a residential house and has undergone only minor modifications - most sensitively in the early twenty-first century, when the restorer changed the colour of the facade from original yellow to harmoniously blue-white.

Today, the house remains part of the National Cultural Monument of Prague Castle and represents a typical case of the 19th century Central European township residence, which time and discreet location saved from major interventions. It is rather a hidden pearl for a visitor - a place that reminds us of how Czech scholars and statesmen lived and worked in the 19th century.