Martini-Palais

The Martini-Palais faces Ulrichsplatz in Augsburg, a former town residence with roots reaching back to the early fifteenth century. The earliest record names the citizen Ulrich Kissinger as its owner. Side wings join a three-storey front building to a rear block of equal height across a courtyard. The city's wealthy families raised such town houses to display their standing, and this one does so in two styles at once.

Through the sixteenth century the property passed between citizens, counts, city clerks and merchants. Maps from around 1520 suggest three separate houses: one facing the street, one the garden, one linking them. In 1784 Johann Jakob Schüle merged those three into a single residence. The house owes its present shape to the Martini family, who bought it in the late nineteenth century. Viktor Martini, born in Augsburg in 1832, built up the family textile firm and helped found the Augsburg Local Railway. In 1894 they hired Jean Keller to remodel the rear building and add a polygonal stair tower in French Renaissance style. Three years later he redrew the main facade on the square in Neo-Baroque forms.

The textile firm Martini & Cie has owned the place since 1928, and Bavaria protects it as a listed monument. The palais itself came through the February 1944 bombing burned out but standing. By November 1946 the house was structurally sound again, its richly decorated facade judged too valuable to lose. Stand at the round portal and you meet four columns framing a great winged door with wrought-iron fittings.