Villa Stiassni presents Jewish villas and country houses captured by the lens of Hélène Binet
35 long years after her first exhibition in Prague, Hélène Binet, one of the world's most important architectural photographers, returns at last to the Czech Republic. In 2026, she is showing a new body of work exploring Jewish villas and country houses – photographs taken for a research project based at the University of Oxford, in which the National Heritage Institute is a key partner. Exemplifying the spirit of this pan-European research project, this exhibition opened first at Strawberry Hill House in London, passed the spring and summer Waddesdon Manor, and has now arrived at Villa Stiassni via the Liebermann Villa on Lake Wannsee in Berlin.
The exhibition has been opened with a vernissage on Thursday, March 5. Exceptionally, it is installed directly in the staircase hall of Villa Stiassni, where it will form part of the guided tour for three months. The exhibition consists of 24 framed photographs, taken with an Arca Swiss F Classic 4×5 large format analog camera and occasionally with a Hasselblad 500C. Some are chromogenic prints (c-prints) and others are silver gelatin prints hand printed in London. The exhibition includes information about the historic houses themselves, complementing the book Jewish Country Houses (Profile Books, 2024) which Binet has produced with Juliet Carey and Abigail Green.
The photographs depict the following buildings: Villa Tugendhat, Brno (CZ), Villa Kérylos, Beaulieu-Sur-Mer, French Riviera (FR), Liebermann Villa on Lake Wansee, Berlin (DE), Villa Montesca, Umbria (I), Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, (UK), Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, London (UK), Nymans, West Sussex (UK), Hughenden Manor, Buckinghamshire (UK), and the Montfiore Synagogue and Mausoleum at Ramsgate in Kent (UK).
The exhibition is held under the patronage of JUDr. Markéta Vaňková, Mayor of the City of Brno, and Mgr. Jan Grolich, Governor of the South Moravian Region.
As Curator Viktoria Bernardette Krieger of the Liebermann-Villa Berlin writes: ‘The exhibition invites visitors to examine individual houses in detail, to discover subtle and obvious details, common and individual elements, to immerse themselves in the stories of the houses and their inhabitants, and to learn about their historical significance and their use up to the present day.‘
As Sabine Scherek writes, in her review for Studio International, ‘Binet’s works show a love for detail and emanate a great calmness. The visitor can feel how she took time to get to know the houses. Her compositions are often marked by the tension between twirling shapes and straight lines, horizontal and vertical. Besides offering glimpses of these estates, the true achievement of the show is to highlight the contribution Jews made to the cultural heritage of the respective countries.‘
Few places could therefore be so fitting a venue for such an exhibition as the City of Brno.
The exhibition was prepared in cooperation with the Jewish Country Houses project, Waddesdon Manor and Strawberry Hill castles, and Villa Liebermann am Wannsee, and financed by the Martin J Gross Family Foundation, the statutory city of Brno, and the South Moravian Region.
