Kamienica Goetzów-Okocimskich, Kraków

Kamienica Goetzów-Okocimskich is a late nineteenth-century townhouse on Saint John Street in Kraków’s Old Town, designed by Teodor Talowski for Albina Götz-Okocimska. Its ornate gate and signed façade reward close attention, while medieval and Renaissance fragments found beneath the site were reused in its decoration.

Kamienica Goetzów-Okocimskich is the late nineteenth-century townhouse on Saint John Street in Kraków’s Old Town. Teodor Talowski created it for Albina Götz-Okocimska, the widow of Jan Ewangelista Götz, founder of the Okocim brewery. Construction ran from 1896 to 1897, and Talowski made a conspicuous calling card here: an inscription beside a first-floor window gives his name and the year 1897.

Notice the entrance gate at street level. Its painted metalwork carries gilded accents, slender twisted columns, and plant decoration around the glazed upper portion. The façade shifts from patterned plaster below to carefully finished brick above, giving this townhouse a deliberately layered character.

This plot already had a remarkably long history. Two earlier houses occupied it from the late Middle Ages, then disappeared in the early eighteenth century. When the foundations for this building were excavated, workers uncovered remnants of those predecessors: late-Gothic doors, Renaissance stone doorframes, cornices, reliefs, and column capitals.

Some of those finds were incorporated into this house’s decoration, so fragments from earlier Kraków survive within Talowski’s turn-of-the-century creation. The building entered the Małopolska regional register of historic properties on the nineteenth of February 1968.