The story begins with the collaboration between publisher Jan Laichter and architect Jan Kotěra. Together they created one of Prague’s earliest modernist apartment buildings in the Vinohrady district. Kotěra brought the publishing business, the family home and rental apartments into a single building. The book explores how the publisher’s ambitions shaped both its layout and its architectural character.

Architectural research sits alongside family recollections, letters, original drawings and period photographs. The building’s history is inseparable from the people who lived and worked there: publishers Jan and František Laichter, and painter Věra Jičínská-Laichterová, whose studio occupied the attic. Their personal stories give the archival material a human context.

Through the house, the book follows the upheavals of the twentieth century: independent Czechoslovakia, Nazi occupation and the communist suppression of private publishing in 1949, when thousands of books were destroyed. It also traces the family’s later eviction and the decades of neglect that separated the building from its original purpose.

Restitution after the fall of the Iron Curtain marks the beginning of gradual restoration and efforts to welcome the public into the house. Alongside architectural history, the book considers how cultural memory passes between generations and why intellectual and publishing freedom matter. Its publication is itself part of reviving the family’s publishing tradition, interrupted here in 1949.