House Rehrmann-Fey

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Street facade of the Rehrmann-Fey house

The house Rehrmann-Fey , even house Rehrmann called, is a former draper house in the Belgian town of Eupen . The baroque building has the address Kaperberg 2-4 and has been a protected cultural monument since August 3, 1956 .

Today the administration of a school and parts of the State Archives in Eupen are housed there.

history

At the beginning of the 18th century, several houses that belonged to the Schmit family and the heirs of Johann Voss stood on the site of the current building. Martin Rehrmann, a cloth merchant from Bielefeld, acquired these houses in 1724 and had them demolished in order to have a representative new building built there for residential and business purposes by 1728. The plans for it probably came from the Aachen city builder Laurenz Mefferdatis . Although there is so far no tangible evidence for this attribution, the Rehrmann-Fey house is similar to the Nyssen house (Gospertstrasse 56), which was verifiably designed by Mefferdatis. A plan of the building on Kaperberg stored in the Eupen City Museum in Gospertstrasse 52 was for a long time attributed to Mefferdatis, but it is much more likely that the builder and son-in-law of Martin Rehrmann, Johann Conrad Schlaun , is the author and that the unsigned and undated plan is a later renovation project shows.

After Martin Rehrmann's death in 1746, his three children inherited the house. Their families shared the property in 1768. From this point on, the two halves of the building experienced different and independent developments. The north-western half, the so-called lower house, went to Johann Conrad Schlaun, the widower of Rehrmann's daughter Anna Catharina, and to Leonard and Peter Fey, the sons of Anna's sister Maria Catharina. Rehrmann's son Martin received the southeastern half. Schlaun and his sons sold their stake in 1770 to the Fey brothers, who were the sole owners of the House of Commons that year. In 1782 it belonged to Nikolaus Fey, who left it to his sons in 1788. They sold it to Roemer & Hansen in 1795 for 14,000  thalers . In 1826 this part of the house belonged to the heirs of Richard Hansen, before it was acquired by the city of Eupen in 1862 for 5250 thalers in order to set up a high school there.

The other half of the building was owned by Leonard Fey junior at the end of the 1770s. After his death in 1781, his widow Anna Elisabeth Römer married the cloth manufacturer Johann Gerhard Hüffer in 1782 and brought the property with him into the marriage. He set up the " Hüffer & Morkramer " cloth factory there , which after his death in 1823 - like the property - his nephew Anton Wilhelm Hüffer inherited. He bequeathed the business to his son Eduard, who sold the house to the city of Eupen in 1890 for 18,000  marks . It thus reunited both halves of the house in one hand and also used the space gained for the school operation, which had been a secondary school since 1886 .

Soldiers were billeted in the building during the First World War . After the end of the war, the German areas around Malmedy , Sankt Vith and Eupen had become Belgian through the Treaty of Versailles , and so the formerly Prussian high school in the Rehrmann-Fey house was continued as Collège Patronné under the patronage of the Liège diocese and the city of Eupen from 1921 . Due to the increasing number of pupils, there were plans for a new school building as early as 1926, which, however, could only be implemented in the 1930s. In order to make room for a new modern building, the rear part of the house around the second inner courtyard was torn down, making the building significantly smaller. During the Second World War , a military hospital for American soldiers was housed in most of the remaining building .

The Rehrmann-Fey house was used for school purposes until 1996. Today, the north-western wing only houses the administration of the Pater Damian School, which emerged from the Collège Patronné . The other wings are used by the State Archives, which moved into the building in March 1989. The city is meanwhile planning to sell the house to the German-speaking community for 1.8 million euros .

description

architecture

Haus Rehrmann-Fey is a closed four-wing complex, the brick masonry wings of which enclose an inner courtyard. Until the 1930s there were three further wings to the northeast of the current building, which enclosed a second courtyard. Each wing of the building has three floors and is closed off by a hipped roof. They are based on a base made of regular blocks of houses and get lower the higher they are.

Inner courtyard as seen from the southeast wing
Bluestone water basin

The street facade on the southwest side is divided into ten axes by rectangular windows. The windows have bluestone framing in a tooth-cut sequence , their Solbank made of the same material is designed as a cornice . The tooth cut motif is repeated in the corner blocks of the building and its two chimneys . The windows are coupled on the second floor . On the first floor there are two arched gate entrances with monolithic profiled walls made of bluestone in the middle four axes . Their wedges show linear motifs. Above that there is an eaves molding with a strong relief . Probably renewed in the 19th century, they lead into the cobblestone courtyard of the building. There on the courtyard facade of the north-west wing there is a two-part, rectangular water basin made of bluestone, which shows the coat of arms of the Rehrmann family and the year 1728 on one side. The Rehrmann coat of arms can also be found in the eaves strip above the wedge of the western, courtyard-side archway. The two gateways have two arched counterparts in the northeast wing. They used to lead to the second inner courtyard behind it, which is no longer preserved. Their trapezoidal wedge stones on the courtyard side both show the year 1726. One of the two wedge stones on the outside of this wing shows the Rehrmann coat of arms and the initials MR (Martin Rehrmann).

The north-west and south-east wings are eight-axis, with the eastern, two-axis long part of the two tracts being set back a little compared to the other six axes. There are two doors with bluestone walls and a skylight over a straight lintel on the ground floor . The door in the north-west wing can be dated to 1736 by a number. The ground floor of the north-west wing has cross- floor windows , while two transverse- floor windows have been preserved on the ground floor of the north-east wing . At the intersection of the southwest and northwest wings, there is a slate-clad lantern on the roof .

inside rooms

Due to the various types of use throughout history, little has been preserved of the once magnificent interior. In today's reading room of the State Archives, elaborately crafted stucco ceilings and a large marble fireplace with stucco top still bear witness to the once rich interior of the 18th century. Furthermore, two stairwells in the Aachen-Liège style have been preserved. The wooden stairs have baluster railings and carved posts. The south-eastern stairwell is also equipped with stucco ceilings, a ceiling painting and Delft faience panels. The stucco work in both halves of the house is attributed to the master plasterer Tomaso Vasalli.

  • Reading room of the State Archives

  • Fireplace in the reading room of the State Archives

  • Staircase with baluster staircase

  • Stucco ceiling with painting

literature

  • Town houses. In: Michael Amplatz u. a .: The architectural and art monuments of Eupen and Kettenis (= Eupen history. Volume 10). Markus-Verlag, Eupen 1976, pp. 66-125, here: pp. 91-93.
  • Marcel Bauer, Frank Hovens, Anke Kappler, Belinda Petri, Christine Vogt, Anke Volkmer: On the way in Couvens footsteps. Grenz-Echo Verlag, Eupen 2005, ISBN 90-5433-187-9 , pp. 129-131.
  • Jeremy Lübbert: The Rehrmann House. Kaperberg 2-7. Eupen 2012.
  • Heribert Reiners , Heinrich Neu : The art monuments of Eupen-Malmedy. Reprint of the 1935 edition. Schwann, Düsseldorf 1982, ISBN 3-590-32117-2 , p. 105.
  • Administration of the German-speaking Community (Hrsg.): Eupen (= monuments directory. Volume 5a). Administration of the German-speaking Community, Eupen 1989 ( online ).

Web links

Commons : Haus Rehrmann-Fey, Eupen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Protection order of August 3, 1956 (PDF; 141 kB)
  2. ↑ Information on the Rehrmann-Fey house on ostbelgien.net , accessed on March 7, 2018.
  3. ↑ Marcel Bauer u. a .: On the way in Couven's footsteps. 2005, p. 129.
  4. ↑ town houses. In: Michael Amplatz u. a .: The architectural and art monuments of Eupen and Kettenis. 1976, p. 93.
  5. ↑ a b c Entry of the Rehrmann-Fey house in the monuments database of ostbelgienkulturerbe.be , accessed on March 7, 2018.
  6. ↑ a b c town houses. In: Michael Amplatz u. a .: The architectural and art monuments of Eupen and Kettenis. 1976, p. 91.
  7. ↑ Heribert Reiners, Heinrich Neu: The art monuments of Eupen-Malmedy. 1982, p. 105.
  8. ↑ a b town houses. In: Michael Amplatz u. a .: The architectural and art monuments of Eupen and Kettenis. 1976, p. 92.
  9. ↑ a b c History of the Father Damian School , accessed March 7, 2018.
  10. ↑ a b History of the Eupener State Archives , accessed on March 7, 2018.
  11. ↑ Martin Klever: For 1.8 million: City of Eupen sells Kaperberg 2-4 to the DG. In: Grenz-Echo . Friday Packet for October 17, 2017.
  12. ↑ Albert puter: Vasalli et Gagini. Italian trainees au pays de Liège. Self-published, Lüttich 1960, p. 36.

Coordinates: 50 ° 37 '53.8 "  N , 6 ° 2' 25.4"  E