[2] Henry Kulka was born on 29 March 1900 into a Jewish family in the town of Litovel near Olomouc in the Czech Republic (then Austria-Hungary).

As he found his studies uninspiring he did not complete his degree but preferred to continue his architectural development as a pupil of the pioneer modern architect and ideologue Adolf Loos.

Thanks to warm letters of recommendation from Jan Masaryk, Arnold Schoenberg and Karin Michaëlis he obtained visas for his family and himself to emigrate to New Zealand.

[4] In 1919 after a brief period at the Technical University in Vienna, Henry Kulka began his studies at the Building School of the pioneer modern architect Adolf Loos.

[citation needed] In 1922 Kulka assisted Loos on the realisation of the first cubic Raumplan house, the Villa Rufer in Hietzing Vienna.

Kulka collaborated with Ernst Otto Oswald [de] on the winning entry of the competition to design the Stuttgart Tagblatt Tower, which was built in 1927.

[citation needed] During those years the works often attributed to Loos such as the Khuner house [1] of 1929 in Semmering, Austria were principally designed by Kulka.

[citation needed] In the same period Kulka was also involved in planning Villa Müller in Prague, and the Wien Werkbund Houses.

This cubic Raumplan was tailored to the requirements of a medical doctor who needed a functional consulting room nestled within the corpus of a comfortable family home.

It is in the more relaxed and subtle management of spatial transition that the Villa Kantor evolves raumplanning, and this points toward changes Kulka would bring to his later work in New Zealand.

He had an extraordinary sense of quality and recognized the beauty of New Zealand wood, lining his houses with fine wooden paneling.

[15] From 1940 until 1960 Kulka was the chief architect of the Fletcher Construction Company for whom he designed a large number of commercial and public buildings as well as private houses.

Kulka is estimated to have designed and realized over a hundred commercial structures throughout the period of New Zealand's post-war industrialization.

[citation needed] Kulka introduced many innovations into his industrial designs including natural lighting and the introduction to New Zealand of the saw-tooth factory ceiling.

[citation needed] In the E. A. Robinson building (1959) Kulka designed a double fenestration system so that offices within the deeper sections of that structure could benefit from internal glass facades which enabled natural light to reach them.

[citation needed] In the entrance to Fletcher Building (1941–1942) Kulka designed a dramatic curved staircase lined with light marble and amber native wood.

Notwithstanding these constraints, Kulka built a striking cubic bungalow clad with dark stained weather boards on the exterior with the uplifting surprise of a luminous and calming interior consisting of fine honey coloured native wood panels and clean fibrous plaster.

[citation needed] Notwithstanding the Halberstam villa's more modest scale compared to other Kulka Houses in New Zealand, it remains exemplary of the spirit of his work spatially and materially.