Tautes Heim. Story & Details

The book about the rentable museum – Living like in the 1920s

The museum-like holiday home in the iconic Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Estate) in Berlin-Britz conveys the spirit of the 1920s and was designed according to the ideals of the architect Bruno Taut. A new book by Katrin Lesser and Ben Buschfeld, the dedicated private owners living nearby, now describes the story of their award-winning restoration of the listed building. Using 60 selected objects from the carefully chosen furnishings, the book paints a vivid panorama of this eventful era.

Anyone who stays overnight in Taut's Home goes on a journey through time: The house with garden is part of the UNESCO World Heritage "Berlin Modernism Housing Estates". It is dedicated to the architect Bruno Taut, who designed four of the six estates of the World Heritage and who also had a precise idea of the contemporary design of interiors. The house was designed along Taut's ideals. It has the aspirations of a museum, but functions like a holiday home. Monument fans and history buffs can spend a few nights here and take in the architecture, colors and details.

The carefully selected furnishings reflect the departure from a traditional representative living world of the Weimar Republic to the emerging age of modernism. In the kitchen and living room, there are various pieces that some people may still be familiar with from their grandmother's living room. At the same time, the bedroom, painted in strong blue and furnished with Bauhaus-style furniture, testifies to the general reform-orientated spirit in design, art and society. This sense of the times is supported by many hand-picked pieces of equipment.

The private owners, landscape architect Katrin Lesser and designer Ben Buschfeld, received both the European Heritage Award and the Berlin Monument Prize for the meticulous restoration of the listed end-of-terrace house with garden. In the book, which is divided into two sections and contains 120 illustrations, the two monument enthusiasts describe how the idea of the house came about, what hurdles had to be overcome and what makes this world heritage site so special.

A lively panorama of the eventful era is then developed based on the stories of individual pieces of equipment. The objects, each described here with a picture and a short text, include well-known design classics from the 1920s as well as kitchen utensils typical of the time, furniture with additional uses or objects with an interesting history. Where authentic furniture was not available, the couple used their own designs based on historical photographs and research. Decision-making processes and details of the restoration are also explained. Many of the details presented have a tongue-in-cheek twist, such as the murals used as a guidance system, which are derived from the function of the room.

The 80-page volume, illustrated with 120 photos, is published by Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg (vbb). It costs 16 euros and is available in bookstores under ISBN 978-3-96982-105-3.

BACKGROUND

The UNESCO World Heritage Site – At the end of the 19th century, the “Electropolis Berlin” was one of the most vital and fastest-growing industrialized areas in the world. The polycentric metropolis, considered cosmopolitan and liberal, was a laboratory and center of modern art, culture and industry. And it was bursting at the seams. To alleviate the severe housing shortage, pioneering neighborhoods were built in the style of “New Objectivity”. In 2008, six of these ensembles were declared UNESCO World Heritage sites of “outstanding and universal value.” The Hufeisensiedlung in Neukölln-Britz is the largest and best known of these residential developments in Berlin. The complex, which comprises almost 2,000 units, was one of the central “showplaces” of the Weimar Republic. New financing models and alliances were tested here, which were used to effectively counter the rampant housing shortage politically – and revolutionized Berlin’s housing construction at the same time.

The architect Bruno Taut (1880–1938) — The central figure of the Berlin building miracle was the architect Bruno Taut, who was also concerned with contemporary furnishing and interior design. As a member of the German Werkbund and one of the visionaries of the garden city movement and New Objectivity, he advocated in his writings the use of colors in architecture as well as contemporary furnishing of interiors and the renunciation of bourgeois representation. In keeping with Taut's ideals, people at the time spoke of "tauting" their apartments, which also inspired the operators to give it the name.

About the restoration — The house is an interesting object of study for monument experts. It is the first time that all Taut's typical interior colors have been restored strictly according to findings and the original paintwork has been documented in the form of small, exposed areas. The house has an outstanding amount of historical substance: inside, both built-in cupboards and all the original door handles and window handles are still there. The original stonewood floor in the kitchen, a forgotten building material, was re-cast according to old craft rules. The kitchen is an adaptation of the kitchen designed by Taut for another iconic estate of the same housing association. Two of the original three tiled stoves were still in place, the missing third was rebuilt using original tiles donated from the settlement.

About the owners — With so much attention to detail, it is not surprising that the two owners, who have lived in the Hufeisensiedlung for more than 25 years, have long been intensively involved with the listed ensemble.

Katrin Lesser is a freelance landscape architect. In this she follows her great-grandfather Ludwig Lesser, who planned the Falkenberg garden city with Bruno Taut and designed lots of important facilities in Berlin and Brandenburg between 1902 and 1933. One focus of Katrin Lesser's work is the preservation of garden monuments. In addition to heritage analyses and reports on the Hufeisensiedlung and other facilities from the 1920s, she has managed many construction sites and restorations of garden monuments and open spaces in Berlin, Hamburg and Brandenburg, as well as preparing, editing and co-authoring inventory reports, maintenance plans, genre inventories and specialist books on Berlin garden monuments.

Ben Buschfeld runs an office for graphic, interface and communication design. He is creatively versatile and active as a designer, activist, curator and project author in architecture and monument communication. He has worked on the World Heritage Site "Berlin Modernism Housing Estates" several times: in 2011 he created the exhibition in the central information café, followed in 2015 and 2020 by the architecture guide "Bruno Taut's Hufeisensiedlung" and the website world-heritage-estates-berlin.com. Buschfeld is involved in various local and European specialist and citizen networks like Docomomo or the German Werkbund. He is co-founder and speaker of the KulturerbeNetz.Berlin as well as designer, co-founder and curator of the “Triennale der Moderne” festival in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin.

Posted February 19, 2025