Kriechbaumhof

You find the Kriechbaumhof on Preysingstraße 71 in Munich's Haidhausen district, a seventeenth-century building in the style of an Alpine farmhouse. Its timber construction and practical layout once housed several families under one roof. The style carries rural Bavaria into the city.

It began life as a Herbergshaus, a lodging house with cheap rooms for day labourers and newcomers seeking their luck in Munich. Hostel houses like it once stood all over Haidhausen and the neighbouring Au. The Second World War brought widespread destruction to both districts, and scarcely anything of the type survives. Structural concerns forced the house off its plot on the Wolfgangstraße in the 1970s. The move was meticulous: the building came apart piece by piece and its components went into storage. In 1985 it went up again, many original pieces back in place. It stands in the Bavarian monument list as an individual monument.

The Munich Society for Urban Renewal owns the property and leases it to the German Alpine Club. Where day labourers once found a bed, club members gather for meetings, events and seminars. Anyone pausing in front of it is looking at a house that has stood on two streets and risen twice.