The Bethlen House Story
The story of the Bethlen House began in 2013 when we bought the court at 19 Bethlen Gabor Street in Aiud.
It took a long time before we found an architect who made us sketches that fired our imagination and we were willing to invest in building a house based on them. That architect was Nathalie Grekofski, a disciple of the renowned Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz, the father of Hungarian organic architecture. We worked together for a long time until the general concept of the house was born. Works started in 2017 and they were finished in 2021.
The organic architecture that can be seen today on the features of the house has several aspects:
- It looks at the construction as at a living being that almost has a soul and that is born like a child. If you look closely at the facade, you can see features reminding a human face.
- It uses local materials as much as possible and drives heavily on local architectural traditions. On the Bethlen House we have used a lot of wood, which is the most common building material used for cottages in the surrounding mountains. Aiud is a small town with an urban architecture where a mountain hut would not be ported. That is why the construction was made of brick but was completed with wooden elements.
- The result is sublime. I’ve heard many superlatives on seeing the house, people love it, passers-by stand and stare in awe at the beauty of the building. I probably liked most the comparison with a mansion. Yes, we can say it is a mansion, the Mansion of Aiud.
We knew from the beginning that we would not have much time to stay in Aiud, as we live in Hungary and have no intention of moving to my hometown. That’s why we decided to create three separate apartments in the house that can be rented out.
The mansion in Aiud, the Bethlen House is today open to people who need to spend more time in Aiud and want to rent an apartment.
