This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Greta Löw-Beer was the daughter of Alfred Löw-Beer, a prominent textile industrialist in Brno, and her own path to the house that now carries her married name ran through Germany rather than Czechoslovakia. She was first married to the industrialist Hans Weiss, a marriage that lasted from 1922 to 1928, before she married her childhood acquaintance Fritz Tugendhat in Berlin in late July 1928. It was during her years in Germany, living there before her second marriage, that she encountered the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the encounter mattered enough to her that the surviving record credits her, specifically, rather than her husband, with initiating the commission that became the Tugendhat House. She wanted, in her own later description of what she was after, a modern, spacious house with clear and simple shapes, a fairly precise statement of taste for a client to bring to an architect, and one that lines up closely with what Mies actually built for the couple on the Brno plot her father gave them. The house that resulted, built from 1929 to 1930 with Alfred Löw-Beer's financing, has since become one of the most studied private residences of the modernist movement, and Greta Tugendhat's role in bringing it into being, as the family member who wanted this particular architect and this particular kind of house, is a detail easy to lose behind her husband's name on the villa's own title. The record is clear enough on the point that it is worth stating plainly: this was, from its earliest instigation, substantially her project.