Feuerschlößchen, Heritage villa in Gemarkung Honnef, Germany
The Feuerschlößchen is a villa situated on Kirchbeuel hill featuring architectural design from the early 1900s. The residential building covers approximately 500 square meters of interior space with structural elements typical of that construction period.
Wilhelm Girardet, a newspaper publisher from Essen, acquired the property in 1903 and organized a major architectural competition. The winning design by architect Wilhelm Freiherr von Tettau became the blueprint for the villa's distinctive form.
The name Feuerschlößchen, "little fire castle", was already used for the baroque inn that stood here before 1903. From July 1934 the villa housed the Gau Cologne-Aachen training school, opened in the presence of Robert Ley and Gauleiter Josef Grohé, with a dining hall and a lecture room for 80 people. After 1945 it held the Athenée, a secondary school for sons of Belgian occupation officers, later turned into an English school. Since 2019 the gatehouse has housed the Stadtjugendring.
The villa stands on the Rommersdorfer Straße (nos. 78–82) on the Kirchbeuel hill, at the northern edge of Bondorf and southern edge of Rommersdorf. The gatehouse, built in 1904 before the villa itself, now houses the Stadtjugendring. The property has been a listed monument since 25 June 1986, and the villa is used by the Siebengebirgsgymnasium.
The architectural competition attracted approximately 900 entries from designers across the region, an unusual number for a private residential project at that time. The generous prize money of 6000 marks made the competition particularly attractive to talented architects.
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