Gardeners House of the Liebermann Villa

Concept and planning: In order to free the main house from ancillary museum functions, the ticket office, store and offices were housed in the Gardeners House, which is located next to the entrance to the property. This means that all visitors enter and exit the museum through the gardener's house. In order to enable this use as the main entrance of around 80.000 visitors a year and the simultaneous use of the small space for sales and transit the groundfloor was gutted, a small vestibule and the store furnitures were fitted in. And one window was transformed into a door.

The roof was completely covered with the remaining original tiles from the villa. The subsequently applied thermal insulation and the heavily damaged original plaster underneath were removed, and the facades were re-plastered, a reference area of the original plaster was left on the south wall.

During the removal of the insolation on the facades, a well preserved door was uncovered which once led gardeners via a stairway to their rooms in the upper floor. The staircase itself was uncovered and its original course to the door was made visible under a glass panel. The stair serves as functional element and aethetic object of the museum shop at the same time. A conference room for volunteers, a kitchen and a sanitary space were installed on the attic, while the basement accommodates storerooms for books and for gardening tools.

Historical note: After moving in, in July 1910, Liebermann noticed that the gardener's house considerably disturbed the view from his studio window and, moreover, that it impaired the representative main front of the house - as seen from the street - and thus the overall effect. He was prepared to bear high costs for the correction and in October 1910 Baumgarten applied to the building authority for the demolition and rebuilding of the little house directly on the property line. The permit was denied.