49 The Regional Library

The Neo-Renaissance villa at number 13 Lípová Street has served in its time as a grammar school, as the family residence of an important Teplice industrialist and, since the middle of the last century, as a library. Each of these periods has left its mark on the villa.

The beginnings of the house go back to 1874, when the Teplice councillors approved a design by the architect Adolf Siegmund for a classical grammar school. Only a year later, the school was ceremonially opened. Students and teachers had 5 classrooms, a drawing room, a library, a laboratory, teachers’ rooms and the headmaster’s office. Teaching went on here for 18 years, until the building became too small.

In 1894 the school therefore moved to a newly built “little chateau” on nearby Mont de Ligne (today the Business Academy building), and the villa was bought by Martin Grohmann. He had come to Teplice back in 1866 as the son of the owner of a dyeing company, and a year later he founded a company of the same kind himself in nearby Bystřany. Its success is shown by the fact that the factory owner could afford to buy this very villa. It was converted into a prestigious residence between 1894 and 1896 to a design by Johann David Ferber. The magnificent painted windows were supplied by Carl de Bouché, the founder of a Munich studio for glass painting. Grohmann’s business continued to prosper, and in 1907 a cotton spinning mill was added to the dyeworks. The Art Nouveau factory building, which stood right next to Bystřany railway station and was demolished in 2014, was again the work of the architect Ferber. The Grohmann family owned the spinning mill and the villa in Lípová Street until the end of the Second World War. The last owner, Arwed Grohmann, was expelled together with his wife and, as he was leaving the town to whose growth his family had contributed so much, he was beaten until he bled.

Since 1946 the villa has served the Teplice library. Its collections hold some 150,000 books and periodicals. Since 2003 the organization has come under the town and has been called the Teplice Regional Library. The building is a cultural monument protected by the state.