Čtyřdomek Zruč belongs to the least comfortable type of family housing in Zruč nad Sázavou - Bat'a with a living area of one apartment unit (less than 60 m²). The four-family house was the first type of company housing that the Bata concern began to build for its employees in Zlín. Over time, however, the company proceeded to the construction of semi-detached houses as an ideal compromise between privacy for the family and the economy of construction. However, the four-family house did not disappear and continued to be used, especially in the construction of new factory towns. In Zruč nad Sázavou, there are twenty of them, scattered in the residential zone between Okružní and 5. května Streets, where rows of semi-detached and quadruplex houses regularly alternate.
Their construction was carried out from the end of 1939 to autumn 1940 in parallel with the surrounding semi-detached and detached houses. During 1940, the final landscaping of the surroundings took place, in which 1,050 fruit trees, 920 ornamental trees and 11,700 shrubs were planted. In contrast to the typified Zlín four-plexes of the mid-1920s, whose flats were mirror-image identical, the dwelling units in Zruč were arranged in a row and differed in the floor plan of the internal and external flats. The difference was in the ground floor service area. The internal flats had an entrance recessed into the mass of the house, which created a protected lee, but there was no room for a pantry, which was only 0.5 m² in area.
The square corridor led to the kitchen, the living room, the staircase to the cellar and the toilet. The outer flats had an entrance located on the side facades, which was followed by a smaller rectangular hallway. This solution saved the space of the recessed entrance, which was used just for a larger pantry with an area of 2.5 m². The other rooms on the ground floor and first floor were identical. There was a small kitchen in the rear service area and a 14 m² living room in the front. A staircase led from it to an upper corridor (lit by a window in the outer flats), from which one could pass to a bathroom, a children's room and a bedroom, identical in plan to the living room.
Like the other houses, the fourplex is partly underbuilt with concrete masonry. The basement had a built-in boiler for boiling laundry with an open firebox. The upper structure is brick with wood ceiling and roof construction. The roof was covered with cardboard and is accentuated by a wide crown cornice. The floors in the living rooms were planked, the others were painted with cement screed. The furnishings included a spa stove for heating the water in the bathroom, a bathtub, a sink, a spout and a toilet. The quadruplex was fully electrified and connected to the public sewer system. As with the other houses in Bata, the facades of the individual four houses differed.
A common feature was the shallowly recessed plaster between the windows of the living rooms. This was either a different shade or filled in with brick facing. In some cases, this was also found in a narrow strip on the outer sides of the windows. In the case of the four houses, there is also a variant of a darker shade of plaster on the ground floor (extending to the level of the lower line of the upper windows) and a lighter shade on the rest of the facade. Adding to the variety in the uniformity of the same houses were the windows, which were painted in a contrasting combination of white and dark green or blue. The subsequent fate of the four houses was similar to that of the other Bata houses. In 1951-1953, the roofs were changed from flat to hipped, and it was the four-house houses where the replacements began.
In the socialist era, the houses were only minimally modified. Most of them had wooden porches covering the entrances to the houses. It was not until the post-revolutionary era, especially with the onset of the millennium, that major modifications were made, as houses were extensively remodelled, enlarged and insulated. Often we also encounter cases where each quarter of the house has a different facade and size. Unfortunately, this completely removes the unique unity of Bata construction.
