Villa Bestgen

Villa Bestgen (1905)

Villa Bestgen, floor plan.

The Villa Bestgen is a listed building in Cologne's Neustadt district .

description

The plastered building at Theodor-Heuss-Ring 9 was built between September 1901 and April 1903 according to designs by Gottfried Wehling and Alois Ludwig in the Art Nouveau style. The construction costs amounted to 165,000 marks.

A round arch extending over two floors dominates the street facade of the building, an elegant semicircular ground floor porch protrudes over the base made of large natural blocks. The basement is made of yellowish-gray sandstone, the facade above is plastered. The iron parts were painted blue, the wood parts were painted white. The columns at the portal were given a colored glass mosaic. Because of this color scheme, the villa was seen as an example of "modern villa construction in Germany", where the "increasing joy of colors" was characteristic.

When the house was completed, the ground floor contained a music salon grouped around the hall, a living room and dining room, which was connected to a winter garden and the breakfast room. On the upper floor a living room, a study, four bedrooms and the bathroom.

The front has a bay window on the ground floor and a wide, round-arched loggia on the upper floor , the main entrance is on the long side. The corners of the building are adorned with allegorical sculptures designed by Adolf Simatschek , which represent the “guardian of domestic happiness” and the “stove flame”.

Due to the stylistic proximity to the Art Nouveau architecture of the Darmstadt artists' colony , it was previously wrongly assumed that it was a building by Joseph Maria Olbrich .

Individual evidence

^ Peter Haiko, Architecture of the XX. century , 1989, p. 121
↑ Alexander Kierdorf, Cologne - an architecture guide , 1999, No. 116
^ Peter Haiko: The architecture of the XX. Century - magazine for modern architecture. Representative cross-section through the 14 published years 1901 to 1914 . Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, Tübingen 1989, ISBN 3-8030-3039-0 . , [1905; 10] No. 161.

literature

Handbook of German art monuments , North Rhine-Westphalia I . Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 978-3-42203093-0 .

Ira Scheibe: pioneer of modernity. In: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger / Kölnische Rundschau from 18./19. April 2009, special supplement "Wohnen & Leben" ( online at www.koelnarchitektur.de , last accessed on October 21, 2010)

50.951166666667 6.9608333333333Coordinates: 50 ° 57 ′ 4.2 " N , 6 ° 57 ′ 39" E

[1] Peter Haiko, Architecture of the XX. century , 1989, p. 121

[2] Alexander Kierdorf, Cologne - an architecture guide , 1999, No. 116

[3] Peter Haiko: The architecture of the XX. Century - magazine for modern architecture. Representative cross-section through the 14 published years 1901 to 1914 . Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, Tübingen 1989, ISBN 3-8030-3039-0 . , [1905; 10] No. 161.