FLORIAŃSKA 17, THE TENEMENT BUILDING WITH GOTHIC ORIGIN,
HISTORICAL INFORMATION
The MOLENDA
HOUSE is located in the
old city of Kraków; two minutes walk from the Main Square towards the Floryan
citi gate. This is an late 13th century tenement house. It has maintained gothic,
renaissance and baroc threads. Over the centuries it got rebuild and expanded.
The major change occured, however, in the XIX century. The building lost than stone
encarvations of windows from first floor, gothic portails from Florianska street
and decoratic wooden ceilings. It got than the present shape. Despite those unfortunate
changes, it still does have a beautiful Gothic cellar, certainly build in the past
for living, and also many interesting architecture details originating from different
time periods, especially present in the rooms of the ground and first floors.
At the corner
of Floryan and Saint Thomas streets one can see a chain fixed to the wall. It
was used in the medieval times to close up the street for the night and against enemies.
Present interiors outlook typical for XIX century: on higher floors flats with suite of many
rooms, shops on the ground floor. In the attic from the Floryan street one notice
initials "AF" - Anastazy Froncz. He was the last owner of the house
before the WW2 and in early 30-ties has sponsored the present modernistic elevation
of the house. In
MOLENDA HOUSE
Froncz has run a well-known shop
with travel equipments. Present floor plan of the house was strongly influenced
by Froncz rebuildings attempts. After his death the house was heritated by many
succesors. After the WW2 the condition of the house had declined, since during the
WW2 and comunistic regime i.e. for about 50 years nobody was taking care about the house
condition. In 1989 - the year of peacefull changes in the Central Europe - there were
15 legal co-owners of the
MOLENDA HOUSE
; only part of which was drawn in
the book register. Such a legal mess was once typical for our post communist country.
From the early 90-ties, first attempts have beguns to renovate the house,
which sped up after year 1997. The major renovation and rebuilding efforts,
including entire building, started only in 2010.
In years 2003-2011 on the "piano nobile" floor (one floor above the ground) - after extensive renovation -
the TRECIUS guest house was established and was in operation. It had six modern equipped rooms with bathrooms
on the 1st floor and two in lesser standard on the 2nd. However, the declining condition of the building,
forced the owner in 2010 to start general renovation and restoration. Works are still in progress.
Since autumn 2011 the TRECIUS guest house remains "temporarily" closed. To see how the TRECIUS
guest house was designed and looked like just click on TRECIUS logo on the front page.
The current plan is to complete the renovation & restauration of the building and to
re-open the TRECIUS Guest House as a three stars TRECIUS Hotel with 24 rooms on
the 31th of December 2022!