House in the tower

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House in the Tower, in the background the Drachenfels (2014)
House in the Tower (1798)

The house in the tower (formerly Villa Merkens ) is a villa in Rhöndorf , a district of the town of Bad Honnef in the North Rhine-Westphalian Rhein-Sieg district . It goes back to a medieval castle complex and got its present appearance in the 19th century. The villa is located south of the town center on Drachenfelsstraße (house numbers 4–7) and also includes a park .

history

House in the tower

A castle-like complex, which initially consisted of a tower with surrounding moats , was probably built in the 13th / 14th centuries. It was built in the 18th century and by around 1440 at the latest on the site of the present villa as the seat of the “von Roendorp” knight family. At that time the property appeared in official accounts as "boven dem thorne". It became the residential building for the judge of the Löwenburg office , appointed since 1555, and housed a prison. The ground floor in the eastern part of the building at that time was built up to the late Middle Ages . After a judge Uckerath shot the chaplain in Honnef and fled, the Duchy of Berg confiscated his property, including the house in the tower . In 1637 it was acquired by judge Michael Heister († 1671), who expanded it with several timber-framed additions. The house remained in the possession of the Heister family even after his death. According to a cadastral description from 1678, the estate included not only a wine press , bakery and brewery but also extensive vineyards . As can be seen from drawings from the 17th and 18th centuries, the tower had a stepped gable. It is possible that the neighboring winery called "Kemenate", first mentioned in the middle of the 17th century, was sometimes used for residential purposes. When the Rhöndorf fire in 1689, triggered by French troops during the War of the Palatinate Succession , the house in the tower and the bower were the only buildings that remained.

Villa Merkens

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Cologne material and dye merchant Johann Theodor Essingh (1789–1847) bought the house in the Thurm as a summer residence. In the following time a classical mansion was created from the property . From 1830 to 1832 the distinctive medieval tower was also rebuilt; the old gabled tower was replaced by a roof dome crowned by a belvedere . Essingh had the dilapidated wing structures of the tower torn down and rebuilt in a classicist style. Only the park facade (south side) was given a uniform appearance. To the east, a cantilevered steel-and-glass construction was added to a greenhouse , the so-called “glass house”, which was expanded in 1877/78 to include a two-story pavilion . On the north side of the manor house, a small chapel was installed on the upper floor - possibly in this pavilion - by the neo-Gothic Vinzenz Statz . The first floor of the pavilion was decorated with frescoes on the wall and ceiling . In 1909, a loggia on eight pillars was added to the west wing and a terrace with a balcony on four pillars made of Stenzelberg trachyt , designed by the Cologne master builder and contractor architect Robert Perthel (1859–1944). Opposite the tower, at the driveway from Drachenfelsstraße, some outbuildings, called “Remise”, have been preserved

After Essingh's death, ownership passed to his daughter Maria Katharina (1827–1908). In 1849 she married Franz Merkens (1823–1905), partner in the Cologne private bank Seydlitz & Merkens . Heir was their youngest son Walter Merkens, city councilor and alderman in Bad Honnef (1867-1929), his wife Emma Sieger died on February 13, 1943 in Rhöndorf. The last owner was their daughter Ghislaine (1897–1992).

An application from the owner at the time, Miss Ghislaine Merkens, to demolish the house so that the property could be used as building land was rejected in 1937, instead the house and park area were placed under protection as part of the landscape. From 1943 to March 7, 1945, Konrad Adenauer arranged for the villa to be the replacement quarters of the Swiss consulate under the direction of Consul General Franz-Rudolf von Weiss , after the Swiss consulate building in Cologne was destroyed in a British bombing on June 29, 1943. The employees of the consulate lived in the outbuildings of the villa and the Hotel Wolkenburg . After the war ended, it was divided into smaller units for rental purposes. Ghislaine Merkens lived in the house until 1960.

The "Euteneuersche Anstalt" around 1898 with bower (center) and sanatorium (later St. Hedwig's house, front) - Park and Villa Merkens are immediately on the left

Neighboring building: Kurhaus, Mütterkurheim and rural community college

In 1895 the doctor Eugen Euteneuer (1847–1922) acquired the bower on the neighboring property, which was last used as a sanatorium. He set up a “hydropathic institute” for Kneipp treatments and named it “Marienbad”. In addition to the bower, he built a sanatorium from brick . The entire property was bought in 1921/1922 by the "Association for Family Aid in the Archdiocese of Cologne eV", the sanatorium was expanded and reopened on February 23, 1923 as the "St. Hedwig Mothers' Cure Home" (later called "St. Hedwig House"). During the Second World War it was temporarily used for hospital purposes.

In 1952, the Volkshochschule of the Archdiocese of Cologne , founded in 1950, relocated its seminar operations from the Nikolausstift in Füssenich to Rhöndorf in the Kemenate house under its director Egidius Schneider and expanded it so that the capacity of the Kemenate was no longer sufficient. In 1956 the buildings were demolished and the archbishopric built a new educational facility on the site according to plans by the architect Joachim Schürmann .

Educational facility and new use

In 1963 the Archdiocese of Cologne acquired the villa from the Merkens family. The new owner tore down parts of the outbuildings, changed the roof structure and replaced the half-timbered elements of the left side wing with solid masonry . The house, in which tenants initially lived, contained service apartments and a hall for use by the mother's sanctuary and the rural community college. From the end of the 1970s it was exclusively available to the rural adult education center, which set up guest rooms and seminar rooms there. A thorough renovation took place in the 1980s and 1990s, during which the glass house and the frescoes were also refurbished. The Remisen were demolished in 1981 because of the poor state of construction and replaced by a new building based on them stylistically, which was merged with the “Schürmann-Bau” and took up the reception and administration of the “Egidius Schneider Catholic Rural College”. In 2000, the Landvolkshochschule and St. Hedwig House were merged to form a joint venture called the Rhöndorf Conference Center. In 2004 the Archdiocese of Cologne gave up the conference center and sold the buildings and the park.

The new use of the villa, the park and the neighboring house St. Hedwig and the building of the country folk high school was controversial in the city. In 2009 an extensive renovation of the villa was completed, in the course of which a glazed stair tower was built. The Landvolkshochschule building has since been torn down in favor of residential development, and the St. Hedwig house has been converted into a "Hedwig Parkdomizil" with commercial units and rental apartments by 2014.

Today the house in the tower with the preserved coach house and the adjoining half-timbered house is the location of an upscale restaurant with wine sales and from the beginning of 2009 to the beginning of 2018 was also the seat of a business school founded in Cologne and an honorary consulate of the Republic of Trinidad and led by the managing partner of this institution Tobago , whose consular district most recently included the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the states of Hesse , Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland . The building stands with its vaulted cellar since the 27th of August 1981 as a monument under monument protection .

park

Entrance gate to the park

The park of the villa extends as far as the Frankenweg and includes some rare trees with populations that include the tulip tree , trumpet tree and spruce fir . On the entrance side of the villa there is a baroque fountain basin from the 17th century with cartouche ornaments from the Heisterbach monastery . In the same style, at the corner of Frankenweg and Rhöndorfer Straße, a large, wrought-iron rococo gate delimits the park, which is made of red sandstone and has been erected here since the 19th century. It is adorned with the coat of arms of the bishops of Metz and comes from the Saint-Étienne cathedral there . A redesign of the park took place after it was bought by the Archdiocese of Cologne, and another after the closure of the folk high school in the former Villa Merkens.

literature

Web links

Commons : House in the Tower  - collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Heimat- und Geschichtsverein Rhöndorf (ed.); August Haag : Pictures from the past of Honnef and Rhöndorf . Complete production JP Bachem, Cologne 1954, p. 32.
  2. ↑ J [ohann] J [oseph] Brungs : The city of Honnef and its history . Verlag des St. Sebastianus-Schützenverein, Honnef 1925, p. 36/37 (reprinted 1978 by Löwenburg-Verlag, Bad Honnef).
  3. ↑ J [ohann] J [oseph] Brungs : The city of Honnef and its history . Verlag des St. Sebastianus-Schützenverein, Honnef 1925, p. 139 f . (Reprint in 1978 by Löwenburg-Verlag, Bad Honnef).
  4. ^ German Hubert Christian Maaßen : History of the parishes of the dean's office in Königswinter. Cologne 1890, p. 38 .
  5. ^ Wilhelm W. Hamacher : Rhöndorf and the Catholic country folk high school "Egidius Schneider". Data on the history of a district and a house. In: Katholische Landvolkshochschule "Egidius Schneider" (Hrsg.): 1950-2000. 50 years of country folk high school. Bad Honnef 2000, pp. 42–55, here p. 46 ff.
  6. ↑ Adolf Nekum: House in the Tower - Villa Merkens - Landvolkshochschule. History of a monument from a knight's seat to a country folk high school. Bad Honnef undated (2003) (studies on the local history of the city of Bad Honnef am Rhein, publisher: Heimat- und Geschichtsverein “Herrschaft Löwenburg” eV , issue 15), pp. 31–83.
  7. ↑ Adolf Nekum: House in the Tower - Villa Merkens - Landvolkshochschule. History of a monument from a knight's seat to a country folk high school. Bad Honnef o. J. (2003) (studies on the local history of the city of Bad Honnef am Rhein, publisher: Heimat- und Geschichtsverein Herrschaft Löwenburg eV, issue 15), p. 40 f.
  8. ^ Franz-Josef Esser: The Villa Merkens, Konrad Adenauer, Consul von Weiss and the great politics. In: Katholische Landvolkshochschule "Egidius Schneider" (Hrsg.): 1950-2000. 50 years of country folk high school. Bad Honnef 2000, p. 78 f.
  9. ^ Ansgar Sebastian Klein : Rise and Rule of National Socialism in the Siebengebirge . Klartext Verlag, Essen 2008, ISBN 978-3-89861-915-8 , p. 602 (also dissertation University of Bonn, 2007).
  10. ↑ Cologne Business School for Theoretical and Applied Business Administration - Wifa Group - GmbH , entries in the commercial register of March 23, 2009 and March 23, 2018
  11. ↑ Cologne Business School - wifa
  12. ↑ Representations in Trinidad and Tobago , Federal Foreign Office
  13. ↑ Bek. D. Prime Minister - LPA II 1 - 450d – 1 v. April 20, 2011: Honorary Consular Mission of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago in Bad Honnef near Bonn , Ministerialblatt (MBl. NRW.) - 2011 edition No. 13 of June 8, 2011, p. 171
  14. ↑ List of monuments of the city of Bad Honnef , number A 3

Coordinates: 50 ° 39 ′ 30.6 ″  N , 7 ° 12 ′ 49.5 ″  E