Villa Spiritus, Protected villa in Gronau district, Bonn, Germany.
Villa Spiritus is a villa at the end of Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße in Bonn's Gronau district, built in 1896/97 to a design by Cologne architects Alfred Müller and Otto Grah. The main building has two full storeys plus an attic and is topped by a tower. Its façades are clad in Weiberner tuff, with a curved baroque-style gable facing the Rhine, neo-Gothic tracery around the bay windows and terrace, a Renaissance-style entrance portal on the courtyard side, and Gothic arched friezes on the tower.
Villa Spiritus was built in 1896/97 for Bonn's mayor Wilhelm Spiritus, to designs by Cologne architects Alfred Müller and Otto Grah, as the first house on the then unfinished Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße. French occupation troops seized it in 1919, and in 1933/34 it was converted into three flats. From 1945 to 2011 the British forces used it, first as a liaison staff to the Parliamentary Council, later as headquarters of their liaison organisation; the Federal Republic bought it in 1956.
The villa is named after Wilhelm Spiritus, Bonn's mayor from 1891 to 1919, who had it built as his family home; the riverside promenade below, Wilhelm-Spiritus-Ufer, also bears his name. His coat of arms with a jousting helmet and the Prussian eagle hangs above the courtyard entrance, while the Rhine side carries Bonn's city arms with a barred helmet. Since 2012 the building has been privately used as a residence.
The villa is privately owned and not open to visitors; it was sold in 2012 for residential use and later renovated under heritage supervision. The public can still walk the wide, listed staircase beside the house down to the Wilhelm-Spiritus-Ufer on the Rhine. The building stands at the end of Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße, opposite the Bundeskartellamt and Villa Hammerschmidt.
The villa is not open to the public: it was sold by the Bundesanstalt für Immobilienaufgaben in 2012 for private residential use and then renovated under heritage supervision. The former attic was converted into a loft flat with new windows, now used as an office. A wide public staircase at the villa, itself a protected monument, leads down to the Wilhelm-Spiritus-Ufer on the Rhine.
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