Villa Malaga

Street side, winter 2019

Street view with property delimitation, October 2018

The Villa Malaga is a classical secular building from 1840 in Lenzburg in the canton of Aargau . It was built by Joseph Caspar Jeuch for the widow Luise Meyer-Rohr on Schützenmattstrasse . The building has been a cantonal monument since February 1960, and it is also a cultural asset of national importance .

description

Surroundings

The house is the last in a row with similar buildings that were erected at the same time, all out of town on the left side of the street with their front facing east. House number 3 has the so-called Villa Alice , which was previously built also by Jeuch two years house number 5 is the Rosenhaus . After Villa Malaga at number 7 there is no other building on Schützenmattstrasse, which from here makes a slight right turn and joins Hendschickerstrasse. All three buildings are in alignment, but not exactly parallel to the street, so that the distance to the street out of town is getting bigger from house to house, which promotes the character of the increasing proportion of green. Opposite, the year 1837 is carved into the retaining wall at the level of the transition to Henschickerstrasse .

The Schützenmattstrasse, which is completely paved in cobblestone, is also entered in the federal inventory of historical traffic routes in Switzerland . It was part of Hauptstrasse 1 and has national significance in its course. It still has the appearance it was redesigned at the beginning of the 19th century.

Towards the street, all of the above-mentioned properties close with a stone and forged enclosure from the time the houses were built, which gives the street a uniform character. Part of the ensemble is a set-back, oval fountain between properties 5 and 7, next to which garden gates lead into the two adjacent properties.

building

The two-storey, five-axis building with a mid- rise like a dwelling corresponds with its current appearance to the renovations for the wine importer and later Spanish consul Alfred Zweifel , who had it redesigned for his needs. He owned the Malaga cellars , which adjoined the property at the rear. The name of the villa comes from Zweifel, who had it worked into the central arch field with decorative ornamentation and which, with these three windows on the upper floor , is committed to the round arch style . On the garden side, the company logo with the El Faro lighthouse is embedded in the same place . The street front is dominated by the three-axis central building, which is richly structured and which are symmetrically joined by two single-axis side wings. The middle section of this decorative side is dominated on the upper floor by four non-load-bearing pilasters that frame the floor-to- ceiling windows. The blind pillars with neo-Corinthian capital carry the distinctive triangular gable . A flat gable roof sits on top of it. The narrow sides of the house are triaxial, with old shrubbery and rather inconspicuous.

Living room on the 1st floor

The rectangular floor plan is oriented to the east with a view of the hilltop castle Lenzburg . In this direction, there is also a spacious terrace on the ground floor and an elongated balcony with a cast-iron railing above. On the mezzanine floor above today's entrance there is a balcony on the west side of 25 m². In 1911, the owner made further changes by adding a 17.5 m², single-storey entrance hall on the south side. The building was more than 100 years ago from the front on the south facade opened . It was not until the renovation in 1977 that the main entrance was relocated directly to the stairwell on the back of the garden. This means that there are two 50-year periods in the history of building in which the house has not been significantly changed.

The stone, three-flight staircase connects the wide, approx. 20 m² corridors on the respective floors, around which the living rooms are arranged in a horseshoe shape. From here doors go into the two side wings as well as centrally into the living room, which forms an enfilade with the two side rooms . The windows to the north and south, however, are not in this alignment.

The floor plan on both floors is almost identical. In order to change the use of several parties, individual partition walls were carefully drawn in during the last renovation. On the ground floor there are two rooms of 40 m², on the upper floor a room of 15 m² for the use of another party, so that approx. 110 m² are available for the larger living areas; the attic remained unchanged.

The building was placed under cantonal protection on February 12, 1960; on August 26, 2016, the national protection of cultural property followed.

Furnishing

The interiors still radiate the building-time condition for which classicism is characterized, especially the light colors. On the ground floor there is still wallpaper with a printed balustrade . Although the spirit of historicism can still be seen in details such as the balcony grille , with the renovation in 1896 the colors became stronger and the decoration more diverse. The southern extension reflects the Art Nouveau . Elaborate stucco work as well as wall and ceiling paintings are still visible in many rooms. The original wooden floor is also still there in most of the rooms. Paneling and built-in cupboards are decorated with grain paintings on the ground floor.

Usage history

Nothing is known about the contact between the client and the young architect, but the building of the Villa Malaga is one of his earliest works. After Alfred Zweifel bought it in 1896, he changed both the exterior and interior design. In addition to affixing the lettering on the east and the company emblem on the west side of the house, he had a new mosaic floor installed in the hallway on the ground floor , which he had GRÜSSGOTT marked with his initials AZB on the entrance threshold . Before that, there were large-format sandstone slabs laid diagonally there, as is still the case today in the same place on the upper floor.

Even before this renovation, the Queen Mother Isabella II of Spain was a guest in the Villa Malaga. She visited Zweifel in 1891 in his capacity as Spanish consul and also had the Bodega Malaga shown to her.

In 1911, Zweifel added a more generous entrance area to the north-east corner with large lattice windows, in which the upper third was decorated with floral stained glass motifs. This light and simple color scheme is a special feature of this building. No major changes have taken place for over half a century. In 1970 the city of Lenzburg received the property by bequest and sold it on. It was not until the next change of ownership in 1977 that the premises were comprehensively renovated and adapted to a pediatrician practice. The former natural slate roofing was exchanged for Eternit slate shingles of the same color, a veranda that was subsequently added to the rear was demolished, the natural stone plinths, window frames and the cornice were restored, a new, fine-pored facade plaster was applied with the replacement of the imitation corner cubes. The client was the city of Lenzburg. The monument office contributed to the costs of over 26,000 francs.

In 2010, after several years of vacancy, ownership changed to the lawyer Roland Padrutt, who ran a law firm there together with his colleague Martin Schwaller from Aarau. A purchase price of 2.25 million Swiss francs was discussed. But Padrutt undertook illegal fortune transactions worth millions, was sentenced to four years in prison at the beginning of May 2014 and died 11 months later in Vienna. In 2015, architect Meinrad Müller from Lenzburg acquired the property. The work that had not been completed by the predecessor came to an end.

In 2013, at the request of the Stapferhaus Foundation , the city of Lenzburg contributed CHF 2 million from the sales proceeds to the acquisition of the site opposite the Lenzburg train station , which was intended for the new construction of the Stapferhaus .

reception

The city of Málaga portrays both buildings in Lenzburg used by Doubt in a short report, which is no longer up-to-date: Except for the decorative facade, the company building has meanwhile been demolished, the Villa Malaga has now had a different use. The newspaper La Opinión de Málaga took up this story and placed the two Swiss buildings opposite the Casa del Suizo , a villa in Málaga that was built and lived in by a Swiss citizen in the 1920s.

literature

Lenzburger prints. 1957, p. 14.
Michael Stettler, Emil Maurer: The art monuments of the canton of Aargau. Volume 2, Society for Swiss Art History, Basel 1953, p. 112.