Rote Villa

The Rote Villa stands in Potsdam's Berliner Vorstadt, a grand bourgeois residence from the early 1870s. The brickwork wears a red finish, and window frames and cornices in a light colour set it off. Octagonal turrets mark the corners and a stylised battlement band runs below the eaves. A stepped gable with a figure niche adds a castle-like air.

The Potsdam firm Gebr. Petzholtz raised it between 1872 and 1873, to plans by court architect and master mason Ernst Petzholtz. A Mr. von Ziethen, lieutenant and later captain in the Garde-Husaren-Regiment, bought the finished house. In 1892 the restaurateur Gustav Lübnitz took over the property and ran his restaurant Zur gemütlichen Klause under its roof. Later innkeepers leased it, and by the early 1900s the Brandenburg and Märkisch innkeepers' associations kept business offices here. The villa stayed in gastronomic hands until 1999. After a period of vacancy and renovation, the rooms have held offices and homes since 2004.

Look up and you see two rooflines of different heights. One section rises three storeys to a flat roof, while the other holds two beneath an attic and a flat hipped roof. Wooden cross-bar windows light the ground floor, and paired arched windows the upper one. The covered entrance sits on the southwest side, and a flight of stairs takes you up to it.