The Koliba villa, the first building erected to Stanisław Witkiewicz’s design in the Zakopane Style, is at Kościeliska Street, Zakopane’s oldest street with time-honored houses and characteristic Tatra croft at every step. In these surroundings, we can better understand Stanisław Witkiewicz’s concept.

When Swiss or Tyrolese-styled architecture arrived in Zakopane in the second half of the 19th century, Witkiewicz realized that to protect Podhale from buildings stylistically alien to the region. He started a press campaign to promote the style. In his reports and articles, he appealed for the use of local motifs in the houses erected by the newcomers and visitors.

Zygmunt Gnatowski

Then Zygmunt Gnatowski the owner of Jakimówka estate in Ukraine and collector enamoured of the culture of the Tatra Mountains felt an overwhelming want to have a summer-house built for him in Zakopane. First, he was thinking of a cottage like those used by the Tatra people. However, Witkiewicz persuaded Gnatowski into having a house in the Zakopane Style erected instead. The local carpenters built the Koliba (which name derives from koleba, a kind of shepherd’s shed) in 1892–1893.

The interiors were likewise stylishly arranged with furniture and household utensils as well as specially designed tile stoves, cornices, curtains, and even small cast elements such as door handles and outer elements of the locks.

Originally the Koliba villa looked different from what it does today. In 1901, Gnatowski had a huge wing added on the west, which transformed Witkiewicz’s original design by altering the mass of the building. In 1906 Zygmunt Gnatowski died in his native Jakimówka. He left no heirs, and the Koliba went on sale. The ethnographic collection that Gnatowski had kept in an interior called the Tatra highlander’s chamber has found itself in the Tatra Museum according to his will.

Koliba's many owners

From then on, the Koliba changed owners several times. Unaware of its value, they were not concerned about its condition. In 1935, the Polish Rail Military Training Division purchased the building, intending to organize a pension here. In the course of repairs and adaptation, most of the original stoves were dismantled and the unique stylish floors changed. The same happened to the original decoration of the façade. Introduction of new motifs, characteristic of Art Deco took place inside.

Serving as the seat of the German youth organization Hitler Jugend during the Nazi occupation, the Koliba survived the period without damage. After the war, at first a rest house, it was an orphanage till December 1981. In 1984, the Tatra Museum ordered and supervised repairs to stop degradation of the deserted building. In 1987 conservation-cum-repairs took place. Almost a century after establishing the Koliba, the Museum of the Zakopane Style opened here in December 1993. Władysław Hasior arranged the interiors.

Arrangement of five rooms in the oldest part according their original function took place. On the ground floor, the dining room, drawing-room and bedroom, and, on the first floor, Gnatowski’s room and his servant’s room.

Ethnographic collection

Zygmunt Gnatowski’s ethnographic collection returned to its place in the ‘Tatra Highlander's chamber’. Other pieces of furniture, household utensils and small craftsmen’s articles come from the turn of the century when the style was in full bloom. They are by designs prepared by Stanisław Witkiewicz, his pupil and closest co-worker Wojciech Brzega, and Stanisław Barabasz. Barabasz, from 1901 head of the School of Timber Industry in Zakopane, gets credit for introducing the Zakopane Style into school workshops.

To offer material for comparison, the servant’s room has furniture designed by František Neużil, the first head of the school. Neużil himself introduced the term ‘Zakopane style’ to describe his self-designed furniture decorated with the typical Podhale ornaments. Witkiewicz was highly critical of this aspect of Neużil’s activity, charging him primarily with a failure to understand the essence of the Tatra people’s style and superficiality and artistic incompetence in the use and interpretation of folk art ornaments.

The Museum of the Zakopane Style is the only place in Poland acquainting the visitor with the history of the achievements of the first theoretically wrought and successfully effected concept of a Polish national style based on the architecture and decorative art of the inhabitants of the Podhale region.

The Koliba villa opens the brief history of the Zakopane Style, which lasted barely twenty years. After the Koliba, Witkiewicz designed several other buildings in Zakopane, of the villa-cum-pension type, in that the most beautiful, called Pod Jedlami [House Under the Firs]. He also designed furniture, various objects of daily use and elements of the furnishing of the Holy Family parish church. He designed the Sacred Heart Chapel at Jaszczurówka. The main building of the Tatra Museum is from brick and stone to the artist’s last design drawn in 1913.