bg Karlovy Vary

Josef Glaser House

- Stará Louka 2 -
The residential and commercial four-story building, which was originally named Börse, was constructed between 1894 and 1895 on the plot of an old Baroque building called Zum Goldenen Lamme. The current building was built for the local bookseller Josef Glaser and the project of the new building was developed by the architect and builder Karl Heller. Continuous balconies were added to the facade in 1910, and in 1922, the shopping portal was modified according to the project of the local engineer Max Keller. After the , the building was also known as the Kladno House, and more recently, it became a hotel.
An old postcard from 1906 that shows the building on the right
For some time, the building was used as a branch of the Wiener Bankverein, which was founded in 1869, in . The Wiener Bankverein's creation was sponsored in 1869 by the Allgemeine Bodencreditanstalt, which had been established in Vienna in 1863. In 1871, with assistance from the Anglo-Austrian Bank and Darmstädter Bank, it sponsored the creation of a joint-stock bank in , the Austro-Ottomanische Bank, but that venture soon faltered and was acquired by the Imperial Ottoman Bank in 1874. The bank was active in the start-up business and was considered to be the dominant player in financing the iron industry in the Hungarian half of the empire. At the turn of the 20th century, it was particularly interested in the savings deposits of private customers. Besides the headquarters in Vienna, it also had branches in other cities, like , , , , , , and Karlsbad, among others. Following the of 1929, the Bankverein experienced financial distress. In 1932, it transferred a significant portfolio of problem assets to a government-owned vehicle, the Gesellschaft für Revision und Treuhandige Verwaltung, and issued new shares to restore its capital base, but that transaction and a similar one in 1933 proved insufficient. Eventually, the Wiener Bankverein was merged on 31 December 1933 into the recapitalized Creditanstalt.
A bank cheque of the Karlsbad Wiener Bankverein's branch
The dormer on top of the Neo-Renaissance building contains three pointed , three , and a fragment containing the year of the first adaptation in Roman numerals. At the same height, you can admire a lion head from which mouth two originate. The dormer is also embellished with foliage, which is also used to decorate all of the . The corbels are mainly used underneath the roof , as well as underneath the balconies that contain wrought iron parts, which like the on the fourth floor, is adorned with . Four of the corbels are placed underneath , which like all the other pilasters and columns, are crowned with a Corinthian . Between some of the corbels, you either admire a decorative shell or a and underneath some of the corbels, you can see and adorned with floral decorations.
The building is shown in an old postcard from 1916