The area around the Luigi Cazzavilan Street and park is connected to some landmarks of Bucharest musical life like the Radio Concert Hall or the Conservatoire, such proximity in fact turning it into a soundboard. Almost each walk in that neighbourhood is accompanied by musical sounds emanating from some piano in some room somewhere, played by some musician, teacher, student, music lover. Added to this is a series of architectural leitmotifs, with which the buildings making up the local habitation structures are scattered.

One such leitmotif is the bow window, which we see also on the house at 35 Luigi Cazzavilan Street, where it becomes a main element of the façade and a vertical accent extending on two levels. The Neo-Romanian 1930 building enjoys a variety of forms: the ample entrance, the cantilever and window opening which it shelters under its covering, the upper part of the built-in frames on the first floor draw small and large arches, as opposed to the rectangularity of the other components of the façade. The house of an aristocratic bearing finds its stylistic echo in the buildings close to the park and on the opposite end of the street, where motifs of that Neo-Romanian language are displayed at ease.

In its better times, as lived by Aurel Stroe, his family and guests, the ample interior indulged in its eight tall rooms, the parlours separated by glass partitions, the floors and furniture in solid wood. The “small parlour”, the one with the piano, was of course the nucleus, a place to create, work, prepare and host concerts and musical evenings.

Andreea Mihaela Chircă