Haus Riensberg

Haus Riensberg stands in Bremen’s Schwachhausen district as a historic estate and Focke Museum site. Its T-shaped house combines an older northern wing, a former stable and hayloft, with a southern residential wing added in 1768. An English landscape garden preserves part of the original moat and extends around the buildings.

The grounds probably began as a fortified farm during the settlement of Hollerland in the twelfth century. Stedinger forces destroyed a castle here in 1213, creating the first documented reference to Riensberg. The Wolde family owned the estate in the fourteenth century, before taking the name van Riensberg. The Schöne family later added the classical residential wing, while the von Post family gave the estate its names Postenhof and Postscher Hof. After the Second World War, the buildings housed exhibitions on Bremen’s residential culture, European glass art and toys.

A bronze sculpture called Großer Hephaistos II stands in the park, created by Waldemar Otto. The garden entrance carries a mid-eighteenth-century relief transferred there in 1953. Nearby, the Rococo wrought-iron Franzosentor preserves a gate originally made for another estate and restored during the 1980s. Wheelchair accessibility adds practical ease to this architectural and museum setting.