Stempel & Tesar architekti

Domů
Česko
Prague
Stempel & Tesar architekti

We design houses that respect their surroundings — modern, timeless, rooted in local tradition. Architecture that serves, not shouts.

18/09/2026

Two family houses with a shared garden in Popovičky

It all began with a timber-clad family house we designed and an empty plot next to it. The investors wanted control over who might end up building next to their house. They recommended both the plot and the architect to their friends – and a few years later, the same archetypal shape returned next door, this time faced in brick.

Both houses are similar in size and layout, each built for a family of four. The fence that once separated the two plots was removed as an unnecessary barrier; a shared garden now underlines just how closely related the two buildings are.

In the brick house, the plan opens on both sides around a raised central space: a round table sits at its heart, with a south-facing loggia just beyond. In the wooden house, raw, unplastered concrete-block walls and an open metal staircase divide the kitchen and dining area from the fireplace sitting corner and a small home-office nook.

📍 Location: Popovičky, Central Bohemia, Czech Republic
🤝 Collaboration: Aleš Herold
🤝 Garden: Lucie Vogelová, TERRA FLORIDA
📷 Photo: Ivan Nemec

09/09/2026

The house is like a child to us, it cannot be put abondoned at any stage.

We are interested in how the house serves and ages.

What about you?

02/09/2026

The smell of petrol, concrete and a finely tuned engine🏎️

The client had a clear brief: he wanted to build a workshop next to his house where he could service racing cars. This brief shaped a family home in Bašť (Central Bohemia), where the car workshop defines the building's entire volume and layout.

The workshop occupies more than half of the ground floor and requires a significantly higher ceiling than standard living spaces. We solved this with varying floor and ceiling heights across the house. Where the workshop eats into height, the bedrooms upstairs stay standard size, while the living area upstairs compensates for the lower ceiling of the office below. A stepped staircase connects the three levels, winding around a central fireplace.

The building is constructed of ceramic blocks – a solution that ensures the necessary fire resistance for the workshop as well as acoustic insulation from the residential part of the house.

A distinctive feature is the black steel structure on the south-facing façade: on the ground floor, it covers a carport; above, it supports a terrace with two fabric awnings, which shield both the terrace and the living areas from overheating in summer. A mesh on the structure is ready for climbing plants to conceal the garage level. An attached spiral staircase connects the garden to the living floor, opening up views toward the nearby nature reserve. 🌿

📍 Location: Bašť, Central Bohemia, Czech Republic
🗓️ Design and construction: 2012–2015
📐 Plot: 791 m² | Built-up area: 113 m² | Usable floor area: 178 m²

04/08/2026

A pitched roof for the village, a flat one for the owners

This site in Klentnice, tucked into the vineyards of the Pálava Protected Landscape Area, handed us a contradiction right from the start.

Our clients wanted a flat roof, everything on one level, easy access to the garden, plenty of parking, and a garage. Meanwhile, the local regulations protecting this beautiful w**e-growing village insisted on something else entirely: traditional houses with gable roofs. On paper, the two visions simply didn't fit together.

The slope of the land gave us a way out. We lowered the entire living floor by one storey, tucking it into the hillside and covering it with soil, the way local w**e cellars have always been built. A fully glazed façade opens the sunken floor to the southeast, and inside, an open living room with a fireplace, and a kitchen form the heart of the home, flanked by bedrooms, bathrooms and a study. Since the bathrooms have no windows, we relied on controlled ventilation with heat recovery to keep the air fresh and the running costs low.

One storey up, right at street level, sits a second, much simpler structure with the gable roof the village asked for: a garage that also serves as storage, the entrance to the house, and a small study looking out over the vineyards. We kept this upper volume light, so it wouldn't burden the structure beneath it, and wrapped it in black-coated aluminium sheet for a quietly modern touch.

Getting it all approved took patience. To justify the orientation of the roof ridge, we dug up old cadastral maps and showed the authorities that houses along this rural street had always followed the shape of the land, not a fixed grid. Little by little, we found a way to give the village the silhouette it wanted, while still building the home our clients had imagined.

The interior was designed by the owners themselves, together with their daughter, designer Kristýna Slezáková.

📍 Klentnice, Pálava Protected Landscape Area
📅 design and construction 2014–2017
📐 plot 1,090 m² · built-up area 190 m² · usable floor area 210 m²
🤝 collaboration: Dalibor Borák · garden: Lucie Vogelová, TERRA FLORIDA
📷 photo: David Korsa

28/07/2026

Český ráj family house

Some of our most beloved projects begin with a challenge that, at first glance, seems to limit all our options. This family house in Český ráj is exactly that kind of story.

The site lies within a protected landscape reserve, at the edge of a forest with views toward rock formations and distant peaks. It's a beautiful place to build but also a subject to very strict regulations. The authorities prescribed the shape and proportions of the windows, their width, even how many could appear on the front façade and many more details. Instead of seeing these restrictions as obstacles, we took them as a starting point, and sought inspiration in local building traditions.

There was a simple, honest logic in our design: in this part of the country, houses were traditionally divided into two parts — one for living, one for work, like a barn or a workshop. Therefore, half of the house is built of stone, half of timber. Where a barn would once have had a wide passage for carts and livestock, we placed tall glazing that lets in southern light and opens the interior to sweeping views of the forest and the mountains to the north.

A single pitched roof, covered in weathered titanium-zinc sheet, ties the whole house together into one calm, uncomplicated form. Nothing was added just for effect; everything has its reason.

Inside, the house was designed to comfortably hold several generations of one family at once. The ground floor is divided symmetrically into two, with a shared entrance. A semi-sunken basement, built into a natural break in the terrain, holds technical spaces and a place to relax, while the attic level offers bedrooms for the younger generation and for guests.

A few facts about the project:
🏡 198 m² of living space, on a 189 m² footprint
📐 Site of 2,715 m²
📅 Finished in 2012

In collaboration with Jaroslav Šaroun and František Bielik.

23/07/2026

Family house in Struhařov. When building regulations shape the roof📐

Sometimes the most striking design decisions aren't creative whims. They're answers to constraints. This house is a perfect example. Its unusual roof shape is the direct result of both the young family's brief and a set of local zoning rules.
The plot's regulations required a pitched roof. No flat-roof exemptions here, and for good reason, since the area is known for exceptionally heavy snowfall. Zoning also limited the house to one above-ground floor plus an attic level.

The site itself offered a twist. It was sloped, and about 15 metres longer on one side, roughly half a floor's worth of elevation change. Rather than fighting the terrain, we let the roof ridge follow the slope, echoing the staggered half-level layout inside. The result is a distinctive, almost sculptural form that grew directly out of necessity.

Inside, it's a low-energy house we heated with an air-to-water heat pump. White smooth render pairs with a light metal roof and aluminium windows, a material language we carried through into the interior's neutral tones, floors, and furniture.

We're proud that the project won Fasáda roku 2019 in the category of New Family House. 🏆

📍 Struhařov | Architects: Ján Stempel, Jan Jakub Tesař
📸 Photo: Filip Šlapal

17/07/2026

Family house in Mšeno. The site everyone else walked away from⚙️

A breathtaking view over the town and the mountain slopes, tucked into a quiet residential hillside, but the terrain was steep enough to scare off buyer after buyer. Our client saw past that. He wanted the view badly enough to take on the challenge.

He came to us already knowing our work from previous collaborations. What followed wasn't the usual client-builder-architect triangle, but a direct, honest dialogue between client and architect.

The terrain wouldn't allow a conventional house, so we lifted it clear of the slope instead. A simple timber volume rests on a steel grate carried by a pair of branching steel legs, touching the ground at just three points. One of them the access path itself.

Inside: living room, dining room and kitchen, three bedrooms, an office, utility room, and a bathroom with sauna, all on a single floor and reachable directly from the road. A cantilevered roof shades the glazing in summer while letting in low winter sun, and every bedroom opens onto its own terrace facing the garden, the town, and the mountains beyond.

Mšeno, 2017
In collaboration with František Bielik and Jan Hora
Photos by Filip Šlapal and FOTES

29/06/2026

Bell tower, Bílovice-Lutotín

Occasionally we step outside the brief and design something simply because it feels right.

This is a bell structure standing beneath a large lime tree on the small village Bílovice-Lutotín in Moravian region. It is surrounded by traditional rural houses. Two steel plates shaped into a gothic pointed arch, or perhaps hands clasped in prayer, perforated with a fine four-leaf clover pattern, carrying a bell suspended at the side.

The open structure, in the form of a 2.7 metre high and 0.7 metre deep spiky arch, is a 15 millimetre steel sheet.

Bell ringing is one of those things we've quietly stopped understanding. It once marked time, called communities to worship, and carried a sense of purification a ritual reassurance. More than that, it was the sound that made a collection of houses feel like somewhere. That bound people to a place and to each other. Without it, a village can feel strangely incomplete.
This small structure is an attempt to give that back.

Completed in 2018
Cooperation of locksmith Milan Tančin
Photo Ivan Němec

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