The study surveys the housing career of Budapest architect Károly Hegedős between 1933 and 1939, based on his diaries and reminiscences richly illustrated with floorplans and drawings of interiors and furniture. Hegedős started his life in the capital living hand to mouth from one grant to another in a room for weekly rent. The first part of the study focuses on the two sides of the coin: families making ends meet by marketing part of their property for tenants on one hand, and tenants renting rooms due to a lack of regular and sufficient income on the other. The second part of the study follows the architect’s housing career to the next phase, when he was able to rent a studio for himself. His reminiscences contain ample description and criticism of his immediate environment in an apartment block in Újlipótváros (Budapest’s thirteenth district). This is followed by an account of the period following his years of studio accommodation, when Károly Hegedős married, developed a steady professional career, and thus was able to move into a modern two-bedroom flat with his wife Erzsébet Stoffa. This section provides an analysis of the interpretations of gender and spousal roles in the growing Hegedős family, as well as the difficulties arising from the modern double-income family model in this period. Hegedős’ diary is used to compare the costs of living in rented rooms, studios or multi-bedroom accommodation with contemporary earnings. The housing career described in the text begins in rented rooms for a young man with irregular income, through a studio flat for the single educated male, to the rented two-bedroom flat for the family man. Based on the diary, the study also examines these life models and the ways they were associated with certain types of accommodation.

The increasingly popular modern blocks of flats introduced a thus far unknown type of residence into the Hungarian housing market between the two world wars. For example, the high quality, high-rent, one bedroom flats (six types thereof ), sometimes containing a hall or a maid’s parlour. The most popular of these were 30-31 m2 studio flats. This type of flat was not simply smaller than previous models of middle class homes, but their proportions and layout were also entirely novel compared to previous ones. While the previously central kitchen disappeared or found place in one corner of the tiny hallway, the bathroom became an obligatory fixture in all of the new studio flats. As opposed to contemporary notions, the 1941 census figures for Budapest housing suggest that rather than providing homes for young and childless civil servant couples, these flats were mostly occupied by single people. Studio flats were typically occupied by economically active, working men and women, as well as widows living on pension. The independent activity of these tenants on the housing market, especially the latter two groups, was a novelty in this period. The type of single woman with a middle class or intellectual jobs appeared in Budapest in the 1930s. Many of them, such as Hilda Gobbi (discussed in present study), had been born into middle class families with stable income and were raised to become wives and ‘professional’ homemakers. However, reaching adulthood they faced a transformed world, where their families’ or their own lifestyle necessitated their income as well. By 1941, those who were successful at switching over from dependents’ into self-sufficient working women entered the modern housing market of the capital as independent tenants of the new studio flats.

Nincs absztrakt.