Villa Reitzenstein, Official residence of the Minister President in Stuttgart, Germany.
Villa Reitzenstein is a stately residence in eastern Stuttgart built in French Baroque style with three wings using Maulbronn sandstone. The complex occupies a hillside location and is surrounded by a 2.5-hectare park that complements the building's formal design.
Built 1910–1913 for Helene von Reitzenstein, widow of a Württemberg chamberlain and daughter of publisher Eduard von Hallberger, the villa was designed by Hugo Schlösser and Johann Weirether after a study trip to France and Italy. In 1922 the state of Württemberg bought it for 5.5 million paper marks to house a planned imperial administrative court; that plan failed, and from 1925 it served as the seat of the state president, with Wilhelm Bazille as its first official resident.
The 2.5-hectare garden was laid out in 1912 to designs by garden architect Carl Eitel, partly in formal French style and partly in English style, tended by gardener Georg Stirnweis. It held specimen trees, a rosarium, several ponds and a small tempietto dedicated to Amor. After 1945 American military housing and an administration block cut the park to under a hectare; three giant sequoias from the so-called Wilhelma sowing remain below the Lindenplatz.
The villa is a working government office, not a museum, so the building itself is not open to the public. The grounds sit halfway up the Bopser slope in Stuttgart-Ost, southeast above the city basin; the park has shrunk to just under one hectare since the war-era additions. Three giant sequoias from the so-called Wilhelma-Saat stand below the Lindenplatz on the side facing the city.
During World War I, the building temporarily served as a military hospital for officers before transitioning to its role as a political center. This wartime conversion shows how such estates could be quickly adapted to serve different purposes during times of upheaval.
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