The layout of the two-storey house of Ellen and Karel Plhák is based on an updated view of the traditional English rural manor. At the centre of the great hall is the sculpturally formed pillar, to which the arcs of the ceiling beams all lead – a motif that could be interpreted as the allegorical tree of life, feeding and unifying all of the branches of the built ‘organism’. Along with the nearby hydroelectric generating station, the villa represents an exceptional document of the stylistic transformation in the early 1920s leading from Cubist or Expressionist tendencies to a Functionalist sense of organic dynamicism.