It was completed in 1930, a Modernist masterpiece by the legendary German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
But Villa Tugendhat suffered badly during the turbulence of the second world war.. The Nazis seized it, bombardments smashed its windows, and when Soviet troops liberated Czechoslovakia it was used as a stable. It has languished in disrepair ever since.
Now, a two-year renovation that cost £5.7m is almost complete. In March, the glass-fronted building that features a thick, honey-coloured onyx wall, floor-to-ceiling windows, winter garden and clean white lines throughout, will be open to the public. Czech officials are confident it will become one of the most popular tourism venues in the region.
"It's been a huge challenge," said Michal Malasek, whose construction company was given the daunting challenge of refurbishing the villa while staying faithful to its design. "I have never worked on anything of such prestige."
Some 80% of the villa's original features have been preserved, making it "the most authentic Mies van der Rohe building on the European continent," said Iveta Cerna, an architect from Brno's municipal museum who has looked after the villa since 2002.
Good fortune played its part in the refurbishment. An original bathtub, missing since the 1940s, was found in a nearby house; and a curved wall of Macassar ebony was discovered in a dining hall at Brno's law school, where it had been taken to spruce up a bar built for Nazi officers.
Brno experienced a building boom in the late 1920s that reflected the growing confidence of the city in the independent Czechoslovakia, created in 1918. Grete and Fritz Tugendhat, co-owners of wool factories and part of a large German-speaking Jewish community in the city, were able to commission the home of their dreams from van der Rohe.
"I truly longed for a modern spacious house with clear, simple shapes," Grete said in a 1969 lecture in Brno. But the family fled Czechoslovakia in 1938, a year before the Nazis took power.
Fritz died in 1958, but from 1967 Grete came back from her home in Switzerland to visit the house several times before her death in 1970. Efforts by the family to reclaim their former property after the collapse of communism in 1989 failed.
After the war, the building hosted a private dance school. Under communism it served as a rehabilitation centre for children with spinal problems until the end of 1960s. The city of Brno has owned it since 1980.
On a recent sunny day, workers were polishing the staircase of Italian white travertine that leads from the terrace to the garden. In the living space, the curved ebony wall was wrapped in cloth to prevent any damage. In winter months, when the sun is low and its beams are penetrating the onyx wall at the right angle, it changes its colour in some parts to shine in orange and dark red hues.
"We know from Grete that Mies himself was surprised by this unique effect," said Cerna. "It changes with weather, it looks different each season of the year.
"I am always surprised by the light condition here."
Combining a design of pure geometric forms with advanced technologies and exotic materials, van der Rohe satisfied the owners' wish for innovation and originality.
The three-storey building with a flat roof sits at the top of a steep garden that faces south-west. It is carried by a network of 29 steel, cruciform columns anchored in concrete.
The south and east walls of the villa's living space are made of huge steel-frame windows that allow a magnificent view of Brno's historical monuments and connect rather than separate the building with the garden.
Mies van der Rohe also designed the furniture, including his famed chairs, and equipped the building with air conditioning and security systems.
During the refurbishment, huge 1cm-thick glass panes were made in Belgium while the white linoleum that originally covered the floor was provided by the same German company that made it more than 80 years ago.
Fritz and Grete lived in the villa with their three children for eight years in the 1930s. Grete said she fell in love with it from the first moment.
In 1938, the Tugendhats fled the country to escape the Nazis, first for Switzerland and later for Venezuela.
Mies van der Rohe, whose work did not meet Hitler's taste for monumental architecture, also fled, purportedly using his brother's passport to get out of Germany. He settled in Chicago to work for the Illinois Institute of Technology and designed a number of significant buildings, including the Seagram building in New York and Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library in Washington. He died in 1969.
During the second world war, the Gestapo seized the building after invading Czechoslovakia and all but one of its windows were smashed by Allied bombings.
During the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945, the living space was used as a stable for Red Army officers' horses and all but one of the shelves of a huge ebony bookcase were burned.
The communists, who took power in 1948, tried their hand at renovating the villa in the 1980s but did more harm than good. The original bathroom equipment and the sole remaining pane of the wall of glass were destroyed because they didn't fit their plan.
The deal that split Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992 was signed in the villa, adding to its historical significance.
The idea of restoring the villa dates back to 2001 when Unesco declared it a world heritage site. Copies of the original plans from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and documents from the family and the Brno archives, including pictures taken by Fritz Tugendhat, were used to inform the restoration.
City officials are trying to buy the original pieces of furniture from the families that own them.
"It would be something extraordinary to get them all," said Brno mayor Roman Onderka.
A grand opening is scheduled for 29 February and the villa will be reopen to the public on 6 March. Officials said they had already been flooded by requests from potential visitors.
One of the Tugendhats' daughters, Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, works as a professor of art history at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
"For me, this is actually the most beautiful interior room in modern architecture," she said. "Usually, it's only in old churches that a room has such a meditative effect."
Hammer-Tugendhat and her husband are leading members of an international committee of experts overseeing the villa's reconstruction, co-financed by the city, EU funds and the state.