Józef Mehoffer House

This guide to the Józef Mehoffer House in Kraków opens fifty years before the painter ever lived there, with the 1869 birth of Stanisław Wyspiański, who would grow up to reinvent Polish theater and become Mehoffer's closest friend and rival. It traces the house further back still, to its use as a safe address for conspirators during Poland's nineteenth-century uprisings, before following Mehoffer's purchase of his old friend's birthplace in 1932, when he filled it with antiques and carved a pine-cone motif into the staircase that gave the house its nickname. Look for that motif repeated through the halls, and step out back into the garden he designed with his own hands.