My father,Ondrej Soucek discovered Chudenice in the early 2000’s while travelling around Southrn Bohemia with his friend Macek, an architect. The building, formerly a rectory was purchased from the Bishopric of Pilsen in auction and is listed as a cultural heritage building. Uniquely, it combined my father’s wish as a Czechoslovak to restore a building in his former homeland and his passion history.Built in 1737, the rectory is an attractive neo-classical building set in a charming historical village.In the 1950’s it ceased to be used as a rectory and was turned over to the collectivized farming cooperative.By the mid1990s when the building was restituted to the church,it was in very poor condition, much worse than we had at first thought. The first task was to repair the roof of the adjacent barn so as the roofers could hone their skills and any original beams replaced could be used to repair sections of rotten beams on the rectory roof.

The roof of the rectory is a complicated and heavy structure,typically clad with light wooden tiles,often painted.In our case, cement tiles had been placed on rotting wooden tiles and the roof had to be completely removed. This revealed that the tie beam had turned to dust and many tie beams were rotten. The huge weight of the roof was now pushing the walls out so the building was tied with steel bars to secure the walls. When dismantling the floors on the first floor, we discovered the original floorboards. Windows were replaced but original glass and ‘espagnolette’ mechanisms were retained. Two narrow and long bathrooms/WC’s were turned into four ensuite bathrooms. Concrete was removed, replaced by a natural system of air flow with draft supplied from the chimneys. Replacement flooring was reclaimed to help retain as much of original spirit of the building as possible.