The cellars and part of the ground floor here are pre-Hussite. Around 1489, when the house belonged to the burgher Prokop Kroupa, two storeys and a tall triangular gable were added, and after 1491 the front was given a single worked-out sculptural programme, generally credited to the mason Brikcí Gauske — the same man now thought to have built the Stone Fountain a few streets away. A prismatic stone oriel projects at first-floor level above the central pier of the double gateway, and the gable is stiff with finials, crockets and Gothic window tracery. It is routinely called the finest late-Gothic town house in Bohemia.
Be clear about what you are photographing. Ludvík Lábler re-Gothicised the facade in 1900–02 and sculpture was added then, including the Madonna in the gable by Professor Kastner. The house was stripped and rebuilt again in 1997–99. The medieval substance is the cellar and the underlying structure; the front is a late-Gothic design that has been read and re-cut twice.
Inside there are two separate tickets and they are not equal. “Royal Mining Town” (CZK 80) is burgher life in the upper town in the 17th to 19th centuries across three floors — a good regional display, not the reason you came to Kutná Hora. The lapidarium (CZK 70) is: stone sculpture and architectural fragments recovered from the town’s major Gothic buildings, set out in the house’s two-storey cellars and reached by the staircase in the front hall. That is where the carving from St Barbara’s and its neighbours ended up, at arm’s length and lit, and it is the best half-hour of Gothic stonework in the town after the cathedral itself. Both circuits together cost CZK 110.
It sits on Václavské náměstí, five minutes’ walk from the Italian Court. Check the calendar before you go: it is shut from January to March and again in December, closed Mondays, and there is a half-hour break at noon.
