Sonja, Baroness Poitiers des Eschelles, was the wife of industrial magnate Anton Knips. Josef Hoffmann was a young architect from Moravia, recently employed by the studio of Otto Wagner. According to several who wrote about their encounters with Hoffmann, he was a man of few words, difficult and difficult to know. Yet the young Baroness Knips (1873-1959) established a relationship with him, based on artistic empathy, that lasted for decades. Hoffmann once wrote that "One should not obstruct the intuition", a remarkable comment from one who banished the curvilinear lines of Art Nouveau in favor of the geometry of straight lines, squares, and triangles. Knips also was unusual for a woman of her position in her adventurousness, eschewing the historicist style favored by the upper classes. Her taste and discernment enabled the new art to survive and flourish in a city that was of two minds about the relative merits of its glorious past and its eciting but unsettling present.
Delighted by Hoffmann's remodeling of some rooms in her Gumpendroferstrasse home, in 1903 Knips commissioned Hoffmann to design a country home for her family in Seeboden, a resort town on the Milstattersee in southern Austria. The house, measuring only 9 by 15 meters, was furnished with simple wood and wicker also designed by the architect. The summer house sits at the left of the photograph, with a boathouse to its right, directly on the lake. There was also a horse barn on the property and plenty of room for her dogs to run.
Knips also supported the Wiener Werkstatte in creative ways, wearing its 'reform dresses' in a long-running publicity campaign, in the terms of the day. Loose-fitting and boldly-patterned, reform dresses were a way for a woman to ally herself with revolutionary modernism in art and attitude. Founded in 1903, the Wiener Werkstatte, first through the Mosers - Koloman and Ditha - designed and produced the clothing. The Werkstatte grew to more than one hundred craftspeople in just two years, a silver workshop was followed by others working in ceramics, textiles, metalwork, etc. Knips appeared frequently in magazines devoted to art and design,lending her image through photography to promote the new art. In 1905 a review celebrating the Viennese art colony designed by Hoffmannat Hohe Warte included a feature on Knips’s wardrobe. On several occasions, Knips modeled outfits and accessories at the Salon Floge. run by Emilie Floge, a close confidante of Klimt.
The flower basket brooch Knips wore at the neck of her dress (photo at left) was designed for her by Hoffmann, as was the collar worn in the photo (at top), a dramatic piece designed by Moser. 
It seems a peculiarly touching tribute from patron to artist that Knips asked Hoffmann to design a monument for the Knips family grave site at Vienna's Hietzinger Friedhof cemetery in 1919. Both Sonja Knips and her husband Anton lived long lives, with Anton dying in 1946 and Sonja living for another four decades after she gave the commission. But Knips, whose marriage was widely believed to be unhappy, maintained a personal decorum that, while perhaps a contrast her always forward-looking and active interest in the arts, shared some of the attributes of Hoffmann's austere modernism. The triangular shape of the monument, while unusual for its purpose, is not flamboyant.
For the site of her dream house, (Knips wrote after moving in that she had dreamed of living there forever) Knips chose to buy the Villa Zuckerkandl from her journalist friend, not for the existing house but rather for its site, making the genesis of Villa Knips an early version of the ‘tear-down.’ The decorations were designed by Dagobert Peche, unabashedly described by Zuckerkandl as “the greatest genius of ornament that Austria has possessed since the Baroque.”
Christina Ehrlich, who studied with Hoffmann and with ceramicist Michael Powolny, carried out the stucco work, both exterior and interior. The facade of Villa Knips was studded with rows of discreet diamond-shaped accents, a frequent Hoffmann touch (he used them on the wicker furniture for the summer house in Seeboden, too). Just inside the front door was Ehrlich's staircase, a series of stucco columns spectacularly decorated in the vocabulary of 1920s Werkstatte design. For the interior decoration, Knips chose Dagobert Peche, one of a new generation of Werkstatte designers, whose Viola carpeting is visible throughout rooms on the main floor. In print, Berta Zuckerkandl asserted unequivocally that Peche was “the greatest genius of ornament that Austria has possessed since the Baroque.” She had a point; the short-lived Peche overflowed with ideas, occasionally too many at once, but not in his decoration of Villa Knips. A home, a total work of art, and a meeting place for artists and writers, Villa Knips was everything Sonja Knips had hoped for.
A complex person, Sonja Knips still eludes our understanding. Her contributions to the arts still excite admiration, as does Villa Knips, but the woman who made so much possible has faded from view. Recognition awaits.
For further reading: Sonja Knips Und Die Wiener Moderne by Manu von Miller, Vienna, Verlag Christan Brandstatter: 2004. (available in German only)
Images: unless noted otherwise, from Christian Brandstatter Archive, Vienna.1. Sonia Knips - photographed at the Floge Salon in a Reform dress and collar designed for he by Koloman Moser, c. 1904.
2. Sonia Knips In A Japanese-influenced Reform Dress, photographed at home - Gumpendorferstrasse -with Gustav Klimt's Fruit Trees.
3. Gustav Klimt - Fruit Trees, c. 1901, private collection.
4. Josef Hoffmann - Knips Country House (at left) With Boathouse (center).
5. Sonja Knips Wearing A Dress From The Wiener Werkstatte in a fabric designed by Eduard Wimmer-Wisgrill, with a brooch designed by Josef Hoffmann at the neck, 1911.
6. Josef Hoffmann - brooch designed for Sonja Knips, 1910, Museum of Applied
Culture, Vienna.
7. Josef Hoffmann, sketch for a Knips family grave site, 1919.
8. Front view of Villa Knips at Nusswaldgasse 22, Dobling, c. 1926.
9. Foyer of Villa Knips, with stucco work by Christina Erhlich, 1926, ModerneBauformen Magazine.
10. Villa Knips, seating area with upholstery and carpeting by Dagobert Peche and a painting by Josef August Lux, 1931.
11. Gustav Klimt - Adam And Eve, c.1917, Belvedere Gallery, Vienna.
12. Villa Knips - seating area with Klimt's Adam and Eve, c.1926-31.
