They traded a successful life in the city for their dream. The creators of the Forgotten Cottage project are reviving historic buildings and showing the way to others
You built a café, founded a roastery, organized festivals, participated in the production of gin. Was that a joint venture, or did you each have your own jobs? And when was the moment that you decided to leave all that behind?
Jan: The most important project that we did together from the beginning is the Café Datel in Budweis, which started other things. We put all our energy into it and constantly, like everyone else, dealt with the sustainability of the operation, including how to motivate and develop team members in the long term. We were able to build up a good background, send colleagues to coffee plantations in Peru, Panama and other countries, support them in competing - and eventually, with three of them, we opened the Kmen Coffee roastery, which became a project in its own right. And on top of these projects, I was doing design work all the time.
A pivotal moment came after the birth of our daughter, when we realized that the combination of all our activities had grown over our heads. We had long dreamed of a base in the Bohemian Forest, but we hadn't planned to move out of the city permanently. But then came the dilemma. When we bought the cottage, it was clear that it would need to be renovated from the ground up, but that didn't fit with our projects in the city, because you can't do quality gastronomy remotely. And then there was my job...
We figured that if we wanted to do everything, we wouldn't do anything well. And most importantly, it would be our newborn daughter who would suffer the most.
Zuzana: At first we thought we could handle everything. I remember talking to someone about what we were going to do, and the person asked how we were going to do it. I responded with a smile that we would do it somehow, that it was fine. Turns out it isn't and it won't be. So we started thinking about what we were going to give up. Incomprehensibly to a lot of people, we gave up the businesses that we had built up for so long. But the best thing that could have happened happened - we were able to find three new owners from the team we created ourselves. We sold the business to them, and today they are giving it the energy that we could no longer give.
You had a lot of options for where to go next, but you chose the cottage, which I think was the most difficult path. How did you feel about it at the time?
Zuzana: We were convinced that we would give it our all, even with the house. People used to have children and manage everything else, but a lot of things just didn't add up and we saw them more optimistically than they really were. Anyway, the big deciding factor was the birth of the baby. I didn't want my daughter to spend her childhood in a city playground where I would be afraid to let her run around barefoot. I just wanted her to be able to be outdoors as much as possible, which was a big motivator.
Jan: We see it similarly today, but back then we had a completely different perspective. For me personally, a big factor was a kind of sentiment from my childhood, when I remember that we went out in front of the house and could go bobsleighing in the winter, which we don't tend to see in the city anymore. To experience snow, the real four seasons, that was my motive.
And why did we choose a challenging renovation? We saw, and still feel, that there are plenty of brownfields and houses outside the city that could be given basic care and people could live there in peace. But for the majority of humanity, it is much easier to develop another piece of field or meadow. This makes no sense to us from a natural or cultural-historical point of view, and we see it as a bit of a disrespect for what has already been built. And it doesn't really make sense from the point of view of quality of life either, because to us a house in a satellite town is like a prefabricated flat house. When you come to a place that's been inhabited for hundreds of years, it has some kind of distinctive atmosphere and there are massive trees all around. Nobody builds that overnight. That's what made us think we wanted to do things differently.
Even after all you are doing with the cottage, have you thought of using it as a "business tool" for tourists in the future and moving elsewhere? Or is it already firmly your home and it won't be any other way?
Jan: As they say, never say never, a thousand things can happen. On the other hand, I think the way we approach this place and how complex the renovation is, the more we root ourselves here. Everywhere I look around here I see all the hard work we've done and I can't imagine going anywhere else in a few years. But on the other hand, it's possible that in terms of options for our kids, we'll be dealing with, say, the affordability of a particular dream school. But for now, it doesn't look like that at all. In summary, there are so many weights and balances that it's simply impossible to say responsibly what will happen in a few years. Moreover, after four years of work, we are only about a third of the way through what needs to be done. But the house is huge and in a beautiful location - we'd like to make half of it available for outside visitors when it's finished.
If one looks at your Instagram, by your first post you say that you initially turned down this cottage and kept looking. So what was the defining charm that brought you back to it?
Zuzana: It was the excel spreadsheet.(laughs) Honza had a great spreadsheet that had everything from snow cover to air quality to train accessibility to bike trails in the area.
Jan: Not at all! The truth is that I did have a chart, but in the end it was just plain emotion. Before we bought the cottage, we had been looking for several years. We drove and walked through the whole of Šumava. The Forgotten Cottage is one of the two houses in the last ten years that caught our eye, both because of the place and the way it is. We were looking for an old house that was crying out to be saved and that had atmosphere. In our case, it was the hand-hewn trusses, the stone-vaulted basement, the old wood ceilings or the shingle roof. We also didn't want a house in a development, but in the open countryside. It's already very rare to find a house that isn't surrounded by other houses.
We even have our own creek. Of course, our place also has its negatives: because of the poor soil, almost nothing can be grown here and we don't get much sun in winter because we are on the north side of the hill. But the combination of the charisma of both the place and the house itself made the difference.
Have you thought about playing up the influencer aspect of the renovation more? Your Instagram, where you share your progress, is successful and has quality content...
Jan: It works more so that I always have some thing I want to express to clear my head. I'll write a text, have Zuzka read it and then we'll publish it. We haven't thought about the influencer journey as we all know it. A lot of people follow the profile, so we get offers to collaborate, some quite bizarre. We write about how we make things out of natural materials, how we use stones that we've dug out of the meadow in the sweat of our face, how we do clay plaster and classic hand carpentry - and then a concrete company writes to us asking if we'd like to use their precast concrete in the meadow in exchange for a collaboration.
I don't know whether or not influencerism is a way to make a living, it's not a topic for us. We write and take pictures for completely different reasons, it's more of a personal confession. We release an idea like a genie from a bottle, so we don't have to pursue it any further. For us, it's basically therapy.
Zuzana: Actually, we have a bit of a problem with this type of work because in gastronomy, it seems like everyone else wants to be an influencer and a critic. So we've developed a certain aversion to that. I understand that it's probably great when you feel like you're influencing people's opinions, but... I don't mean that in a bad way, we follow some ourselves, it's just not our way.
Jan: As long as we don't feel like we are. I mean, we know certain principles of how social networking should be done, but if I take the most common ones, we violate probably all of them. We don't make videos, we write with long delays, the texts are too long... I guess we're just not trying to be influencers - and yet over twenty thousand people are following the story.
Maybe you're doing it because you want to give people a meaningful message...
Jan: For us, the idea that there is no way to tear everything down and build new buildings instead is important. What we are doing is our own reaction to the current attitude to housing, to the construction industry and to the government of developers.
We are trying to show that a family with a small child can have a different dream than a 3 bedroom apartment near the metro, that it is possible to live differently. And most importantly, we feel that it makes sense. We meet fantastic people and have something to say to them. Paradoxically, we feel much closer to the people here, even though we are physically much further apart. The way we function here is that when someone comes to visit, we spend a lot of time together. After the first hour we run out of superficial topics and after three hours we're talking about issues of life, the universe and everything.
Zuzana: I would say that the relationships deepen more here than in the city. There we had more friends within reach, it was of course much easier to meet them, but less in depth. We didn't really have to try to do that. You have to go the extra mile to meet here, so the quality of the meeting is an order of magnitude higher.
During a difficult reconstruction, many doubts and moments come to mind when one feels like giving up, but then one looks at the results of the hard work...Photo: Zapomenutá chalupa/Se svolením
Don't you miss some of the hustle and bustle of the business? The adrenaline rush, the fact that there's something going on every day, that you're meeting new people...
Jan: Something is always happening here too. We have a problem with ourselves that we can't stand to do nothing. We can't just hold on to the fact that we have a job that earns us money and free time, even though we are now devoting it to reconstruction. Eventually, we'll figure out something else. For example, Zuzka recently organized the Šumava Coffee Festival.
Zuzana: It wasn't really my initiative, I was brought into it by my friends, but I enjoyed it immensely. I was reminded how wonderful it is to do things that are a source of immediate feedback, when you can see with your own eyes that the event is great and a lot of people are having fun. You can see the result right away. It's pretty addictive and I miss it quite a bit. I'm all the more glad for opportunities like this, where I might get completely drained for a while, but I get a rush of dopamine in return.
Jan: When we used to do festivals, it would take three quarters of a year to get everything ready and then thousands of people would come. We saw their energy and we got it back. In gastronomy, as Zuzka says, we got feedback every day, which always energized us and pushed us further. But we've been rescuing a house in the mountains for four years now, it's going to take some time, and the main feedback is that we have a lot of debt(laughs).
By starting the business, you have fulfilled your dream. Did you and do you have the same feeling when you renovated the cottage? I mean, do you ever think - yes, now we're living the dream again?
Jan: I think so. However, right now is such a difficult, maybe even critical moment of the whole construction, because the roof should have been finished today. But this year has been extremely rainy and we found out that the roof won't be ready for another two months. Sleeping and living under a thin tarpaulin for one week is adrenaline, doing it for six months while rainfall records are falling, that's for a psychologist. We'll be lucky if we make it to the first snow.
So on the one hand we are doing what we wanted to do, on the other hand we don't have the space to enjoy it because the extraordinary demands of this year's work are overwhelming it. But once the roof is on, we'll enjoy it just as much as we have for the last four years. Anyone who hasn't experienced it first hand has no idea what it's like to not have a roof over your head.
Has the renovation and everything you've experienced in the last four years changed your personality in any major way? Your view of the world, your attitude towards yourself, your worldview...
Zuzana: It seems to me that I am the same person who used to run the café and used to meet hundreds of people every day. I don't feel different at all, maybe I'm less distracted.
Jan: I see it a bit differently. The life lesson we take away from everything we've ever done is that even though everything may seem clear up front and we think we know how it's going to turn out, it's probably going to turn out differently. Every experience like this is a huge learning process. For example, after the first phase of the renovation, when we took out a few rooms, we thought we knew how to keep building because it would be exactly the same. It wasn't.
So with that, it occurs to me that maybe one of the other reasons we share all of this on Instagram is to pass on the experience we've had so far to other people. This was great with a coffee shop or a roastery where we passed on all our know-how and experience to the new owners, who are still friends to this day. With a 250 year old house, I feel like there's a tremendous amount of things we've worked hard to figure out ourselves. And now we are asking - how to deal with them? And so we share them. Maybe a few words and pictures will make a few people do things differently. And maybe it will change something bigger. The butterfly wing effect.
