KOCANDA KRAVSKO: A Place Still Becoming
Between Prague and Vienna, a former inn and ceramics factory is being rewritten as a family-run place for gathering, staying — and whatever comes next.
The road to Kocanda does not announce very much. It leaves the village behind and winds gently uphill through the green. Then the chimney appears. A remnant of the ceramics factory, tall enough to orientate yourself by, it is the first sign that there is considerably more waiting beyond the trees.
In the garden, preparations for a wedding later that afternoon are already underway. A woman is arranging flowers. People move between buildings, carrying things, checking things, doing whatever needs doing before a large group of guests arrives. Everyone seems busy. Nobody seems particularly hurried.
Only later do I realise that the woman with the flowers is part of the family. This becomes something of a pattern at Kocanda Kravsko. Architecture, hospitality, wine, flowers, food, maintenance and family life do not divide neatly into separate departments. People appear in one role and then another. A father makes wine. A son runs the place. A daughter is one of its architects. Her husband, architect Jan Hora, is the person showing me around. Somewhere along the way we meet his young son playing in the sand with his grandfather. Nobody pauses to point out the symbolism. There is a wedding to prepare.
A place on the way
Kocanda has always been a place of arrivals and departures. The central Baroque building was originally a coach inn on the route between Vienna and Prague, offering travellers a place to stop before continuing their journey. Even its name is said to derive from the German Gott sei Dank — thank God — supposedly the response of travellers relieved to have reached somewhere to rest.
It is an appealing origin story, but also a useful way to understand what Kocanda has become again. People arrive from different directions. They eat. They drink. They stay for a night or several. They celebrate. Then they leave.
Today those gatherings are often weddings, including celebrations whose guests travel from far beyond South Moravia. There are corporate events, private gatherings and individual travellers too, when one of the rooms happens to be free. Kocanda currently offers 46 rooms and accommodation for around 180 people — an unusual scale for a place that nevertheless feels more like an accumulation of houses than a conventional hotel.
Perhaps that is why the weddings make more sense here than the word event venue suggests. Kocanda has been gathering people in transit for centuries. Only the reasons for travelling have changed.
From hospitality to industry — and back again
The inn was only the first of Kocanda's lives. In the nineteenth century the complex was transformed into a ceramics factory and expanded with industrial buildings. Production continued for roughly a century before eventually ceasing; the buildings changed hands and the site entered a long period of neglect.
Its industrial past is difficult to miss today. There is the chimney. The old mixing equipment remains where clay was once prepared. Steel window frames survive. Wooden structures have been repaired rather than disguised.
And then there are the moulds. Thousands of plaster forms once used in ceramic production were left behind. Some now hang on walls in loose arrangements. Others are stacked like columns. Some became lamps or tables. Astonishingly, the masonry of the former mould warehouse itself contains discarded plaster moulds — apparently used as improvised building material long before anyone would have called the practice circular construction.
Nothing here has had only one life. Not the buildings. Not their materials. Not, perhaps, the idea of Kocanda itself.
A family takes it on
The latest chapter began when Jan Zmeko Sr. and Ludmila Zmeková acquired the derelict complex and began bringing it back into use. The connection to the place was already personal: Ludmila comes from Kravsko. Then the family connections multiply. Their daughter Barbora Hora is an architect and co-founder of the Znojmo-based studio ORA — Original Regional Architecture. Her husband Jan Hora is another of its founders, alongside Jan Veisser. ORA became the architectural practice responsible for Kocanda's gradual transformation. The first published phase was authored by Barbora Hora, Jan Hora and Jan Veisser; the second added Maroš Drobňák to the team.
Meanwhile another generation is taking on the daily work. Jan Zmeko Jr. and his wife Kristýna now run Kocanda together with his parents. Jan Jr. describes what happens behind the scenes as an unusually broad field: accommodation, food, events, maintenance, planning, flowers and decorations, catering, wine and the continual coordination required to make the whole place work.
“A large part of Kocanda is the result of this continuous everyday work rather than one single idea.” — Jan Zmeko Jr.
Standing there on the morning of a wedding, that sentence feels almost literal. The place is not merely family-owned. Family is one of its operating systems.
Architecture without the finished drawing
This also changed the way ORA could work. When I ask Jan Hora what it is like designing for family, his first reaction is refreshingly unromantic. It is difficult. Working for relatives or friends dissolves some of the boundaries that normally protect architect and client from one another. Decisions follow you beyond meetings. The project belongs to daily family life as much as professional life.
But it also offers a degree of freedom that conventional projects rarely allow. Not everything at Kocanda had to be resolved in a drawing before work began. Not everything had to be visualised. Some decisions could wait until a wall was opened or an unexpected material appeared. A blocked window could reveal itself and be reopened. A piece of stone could suddenly become worth preserving. A decision imagined on paper could be abandoned because the building suggested something better.
Jan calls it a more reactive way of designing.
“In refurbishment, you sometimes find a beautiful stone, or a window that had been filled in. The design has to react to the situation. There is a lot of designing on site — and I like that.” — Jan Hora
Kocanda did not even begin with a classical masterplan. The family had bought a large, decaying property that immediately cost money to maintain. So they started. One building first. Then another. Weddings created new requirements. Summer events revealed the need for winter spaces. Accommodation filled and more rooms were required. Only later did a more comprehensive masterplan emerge.
“At the beginning it was simply: we need to repair this house and start using it. During that, we can think about the rest.” — Jan Hora
It is difficult to imagine a neater illustration of architecture and hospitality developing together. The programme did not precede use. Use helped write the programme.
What does not need to be changed?
ORA has become known for beginning projects with two deceptively simple questions: What does not need to be done? What does not need to be changed? The studio describes its approach not as a stylistic manifesto but as a resistance to producing new space, materials and form simply because architecture is expected to add something. Existing fragments can be reinterpreted instead. New form is partly designed, partly found.
Kocanda makes that philosophy tangible.
Original ornamental timber floors remain beside new basalt and cement tiles. Old tables, cabinets, chairs and cast-iron baths were collected and reused. Plaster is patched rather than made uniformly new. The second phase retained the steel frames of factory windows and placed new windows behind them. Original timber boards were dismantled and reused as flooring upstairs. A new external gallery was made from second-quality oak originally destined to become firewood. The result is not preservation as prettification.
And Jan's own favourite preservation argument is revealing precisely because he lost it. In one of the factory buildings stood a stage dating from the communist period, used for meetings and speeches to workers. It was ugly, he readily admits. He still wanted to keep it.
“I thought it was part of the area and part of its memory. Even if it was ugly, we should somehow incorporate it.” — Jan Hora
Nobody else agreed. Not even the heritage authorities. The stage disappeared. It is a useful reminder that preserving history does not simply mean deciding which old things are beautiful. Sometimes the more difficult question is whether an unattractive layer also deserves to remain.
The moulds remember
The ceramics factory left behind a less controversial archive. Its plaster moulds are everywhere. At first they read almost like abstract sculpture: pale geometric objects grouped across white walls, stacked in the former factory or repurposed throughout the interiors. Then one begins to understand what they were. Tools. Negatives of objects. Forms designed not to be looked at, but to reproduce something else.
ORA deliberately turned that relationship around. The means of production became visible while much of what had once been produced disappeared. The moulds now carry the memory of making. And perhaps they are not only about the past. When I ask Jan whether ceramics might one day return to Kocanda as an active practice, his answer is tantalisingly incomplete. Something, he says, is happening.
Some designs have already been produced, although he is not certain where or in what form. And there is still one significant piece of the complex waiting for its next use: the factory building itself. A ceramics workshop or some form of production has been discussed. But someone would need to take responsibility for running it. For now, it remains an idea rather than a programme. I hope it stays on the table. Not because Kocanda needs another attraction. Quite the opposite.
After walking through rooms filled with the traces of production, it is difficult not to imagine returning one day and finding somebody making things again. I already know where I would spend my time. In the workshop.
From industrial archaeology to living design
That possibility also opens a wider regional thread. South Moravia is most readily read through wine, landscape and modernist architecture. But there is another story here around objects and making. A few hours away in Mikulov, the annual Křehký Mikulov festival brings collectible design, contemporary makers and traditional Czech manufacturing into the castle and other sites around the town. Its 2026 edition gathered Czech and international designers around the theme of the garden, with exhibitions, workshops and conversations across the historic setting. Křehký itself works explicitly with Czech traditions of porcelain, glass, wood and manufacture. There is no direct connection that needs inventing between Křehký and Kocanda. The thread is more interesting than that. One place contains the physical remnants of a former ceramics industry. The other asks what Czech craft and collectible design might mean now. Between them lies the question Kocanda has not yet answered: Can industrial memory become living craft again without turning into heritage theatre?
The place fills up
By midday, the wedding is getting closer. The garden is no longer simply a landscape project. It is being occupied. The baroque hall will soon have its own life. The industrial spaces will fill with other people. The family is preparing flowers. Food is being organised.
Wine is waiting. Jan and I sit outside for coffee in the sun.
Nearby is a space used occasionally for events open beyond the wedding guests. We look into the hall and the bistro. There is cake behind the counter that makes it difficult to maintain professional concentration. Kocanda specialises today in weddings and large gatherings, and its scale is part of what makes the operation viable. The official offer combines spaces for celebrations, catering, decorations, flowers and accommodation across the site.
But the atmosphere does not feel like a hospitality machine. Perhaps because so much remains visibly specific. A factory mixer was not removed because reception needed a cleaner image. Old furniture does not match. Buildings lean. Some rooms feel almost domestic; others retain the scale and rawness of industry. And much of what guests experience still passes through the same family.
What Kocanda tastes like
The food follows a similarly uncomplicated logic. Jan Jr. does not try to describe the kitchen as experimental. It is traditional. For weddings and celebrations, the table may need to feed dozens or hundreds of people across several generations. There is little value in culinary performance for its own sake. What matters, he says, is good produce and honest preparation.
“Even something as ordinary as fried cheese can be excellent if you start with a really good cheese from a small local dairy.” — Jan Zmeko Jr.
That sentence feels entirely right for Kocanda. Simple does not mean careless. And regional does not need to become rhetoric. Wine is even more directly embedded in the family. Jan Zmeko Sr. is a winemaker, and Víno Zmeko flows naturally into Kocanda's hospitality — at meals, events and through the family's wider wine activities.
Jan Jr. points onwards to producers including Špalek, Piálek & Jäger and Dobrá Vinice if you want to follow the wine thread further into the Znojmo region. Again, Kocanda becomes less a destination than a point from which other routes begin.
A place shaped by use
Architecture photography tends to freeze a building at precisely the moment before life interferes. Kocanda offers almost the opposite condition. People have now been sleeping, eating, celebrating and working in the buildings for several years. According to Jan Jr., those patterns have already changed the way the family understands the spaces.
“People start using spaces in ways we did not necessarily predict. At Kocanda, the boundaries between sleeping, eating, working or celebrating are quite loose. People simply occupy the place according to what they need at that moment.”
The lesson has been to become less strict about what a room is supposed to do. Guests provide clues for what happens next.
“In this sense, our guests continue to shape the place together with us.” — Jan Zmeko Jr.
It brings the architecture back to Jan Hora's reactive design. First the building tells the architect something. Later, the people using it do. Neither process ever really ends.
Still becoming
This is perhaps what makes Kocanda feel different from a meticulously completed boutique hotel. It is not waiting to be perfected. The work continues. The original ORA press material for the first phase ends its description of the site's future with an almost comically understated invitation: the complex contains buildings of different periods and purposes; each will be approached differently. Stay tuned. Years later, that line reads less like a press release than a method. Another building followed. Then another use. More accommodation. A cafeteria. A winery connection. Perhaps, one day, ceramics again.
Jan Jr. imagines the next decade not primarily in terms of expansion but of becoming more self-sufficient: more of their own produce, closer relationships with farms and smaller suppliers, and more attention to what is already there. What he does not want is equally clear.
“I would like it to remain a family-run place with a clear scale. What I would not like is for it to become a generic hotel or event venue, where efficiency and capacity gradually erase the character that made the place interesting in the first place.” — Jan Zmeko Jr.
That may be the real challenge. Kocanda is large. It needs to function. Weddings need schedules. Beds have to be made. Food has to reach tables. Historic structures have to meet contemporary regulations. A family business still has to be a business.
And yet the place derives much of its appeal from the impression that not everything has been standardised into submission. The road still winds through the green. The old chimney still marks the site before the hotel does. Someone is arranging flowers in the garden. A grandfather plays with his grandson in the sand. An architect notices a wall and decides the drawing can wait. Thousands of plaster moulds remember objects no longer made.
And somewhere within the complex is a factory building whose next life has not yet been decided. That unfinishedness does not make Kocanda feel incomplete. It makes returning seem worthwhile. The next time, I hope there is a workshop.
The KOCANDA Cosmos
Hosts & family_Jan and Ludmila Zmeko; Jan Jr. and Kristýna
Architecture_ORA / Barbora Hora, Jan Hora, Jan Veisser
Architecture, Phase II_ORA / Barbora Hora, Jan Hora, Jan Veisser, Maroš Drobňák
Landscape_Klára Jordánová / My Flowers
Wine_Jan Zmeko Sr. / Víno Zmeko
Hospitality_Kocanda Kravsko / ITVV
Ceramic memory_the former Kravsko factory and its thousands of plaster moulds
Photography_BoysPlayNice / architectural documentation
Graphic design_Martin Utíkal
Place_Kravsko, near Znojmo / South Moravia
Route_Vienna — Znojmo — Prague
Next chapter_the remaining factory building — perhaps ceramics, perhaps something not yet imagined
///
Further Threads
ORA / Original Regional Architecture — From Kocanda into a wider practice built around existing structures, fragments, context and the useful question of what does not need to change.
Víno Zmeko — The family wine thread running from Kocanda into the vineyards and cellars around Znojmo.
Špalek — One of Jan Zmeko Jr.'s recommendations for continuing through the region by wine.
Piálek & Jäger — Another Znojmo wine thread worth following from the Kocanda table.
Dobrá Vinice — Natural wine and another route into the landscape and viticultural culture surrounding Znojmo.
The plaster moulds — Not ceramics themselves, but the negatives that once produced them: an industrial archive waiting for another interpretation.
Křehký Mikulov — Not directly connected to Kocanda, but a compelling contemporary counterpart: Czech design and craft brought into conversation with historic places, traditional manufacture and new authors.
Znojmo — ORA's home ground and the urban counterpart to Kocanda's rural setting.
The Prague–Vienna route — A historical line of movement that turns Kocanda's contemporary hospitality into something less new than it first appears.
The unfinished factory — The most enticing thread of all: one last building, no definitive programme yet, and the possibility that making might return to Kocanda.
