The Portz Insel Summerhouse
The Portz Insel summerhouse can be found around five kilometres to the southeast of the centre of the town of Mikulov on the elevation known as Quiet Island (formerly Portz Insel).
The island site was established by Prince and Cardinal Franz von Dietrichstein (1570–1636), who also had extensive alterations performed to the landscape around Mikulov. One of these was the construction of the summerhouse with its flower and forest garden.
The Portz Insel summerhouse is located on an elevated brick terrace with jutting bastions at its corners. This design was evidently intended to evoke the fortified summerhouses typical of Italian architecture. The rectangular two-storey summerhouse building with an exterior access staircase was connected to the nearby farm buildings by an extensive subterranean system.
The island site was accessible only over the long brick bridge. It was also connected to Mikulov by an alley two and a half kilometres long formed of two lines of trees. The site began to fall into decline at the end of the nineteenth century when the Portz Pond was drained and the former island cut into two by a new railway line.
Today, there is a peninsula with the renovated Portz Insel summerhouse here which is partly surrounded by the New Pond. The gradual repair of the summerhouse began in 2003 when the summerhouse was acquired by private owners. In the first phase, the overgrown vegetation was cleared, the building’s statics assured, a new roof installed, and the summerhouse’s stairway and façade repaired. Another owner continued the renovation in 2013, and completed the restoration of the exterior cladding of the summerhouse, performed the extremely demanding total renovation of the interiors on the ground floor and first floor, and built a new residential loft.
The summerhouse and the bridge were declared a cultural heritage site in 1995.
