View of the Garden @museum.de

What a view! As you look down into the garden of Palais Wunderlich, you get a sense of how large the property really is.

And originally, it was considerably larger! Over the course of its history, the site was twice truncated on the south side, most recently in 1978, when Eichrodtstrasse was laid out. The street runs right past the present garden wall.

The low, brightly painted factory building beyond the wall and the multi-storey house at right angles were once part of the property. That was where the manufacturer Adolf Friedrich Bader had part of his cigar-making operations. In the second half of the 19th century, there were also storage buildings on the long sides of today's garden.

Having manufacturing and residential spaces cheek by jowl seems to have worked out well. The lower terrace with its cast-iron trellis supporting roses or vines was also laid out in Adolf Friedrich Bader's day. On the right-hand side, as seen from here, the Bader family built a small pavilion or pergola in the shade of the cypress tree.

On the opposite side, which would be your left, the garden salon was built in 1867.

The garden salon is quite unlike any other buildings on the property, with a design that harks back to the past, and windows that make it look like a chapel. It’s thought the building was designed by the architect Friedrich Eisenlohr. He’d made a name for himself building mainly railway stations, though he’d also remodelled the collegiate church here in Lahr. Looking at the little garden salon, you can easily see what may have inspired the design.

Dieses Foto gerne zu einem Querformat beschneiden. Wichtig ist der doppelte Steg über dem Gitter

Meanwhile, business carried on just above the garden salon. On the first floor, above the railing that separates the courtyard from the garden, there was a walkway resting on iron girders. It was about a metre or just over three feet wide and was probably already present in Bader's day. Goods could be moved back and forth between the storage rooms in the east and west wings without having to carry them across the courtyard. How practical!