Münchner Strasse in Unterhaching is not known for its beauty. Functional buildings, commercial buildings, parking lots, driveways – a thoroughfare like so many in urban communities. House number twelve is completely out of the ordinary. The old Art Nouveau villa with a turret, bay window, a Madonna and pale pink paint looks strangely placed between an underground car park exit and a row of terraced houses. Like an eccentric diva in the midst of boring average architecture. A hundred years ago there were some magnificent houses like Villa Franziska in Unterhaching. She is the last one on this street.
“It’s the best” is written in large, somewhat shaky letters above the entrance. No one knows today which words that had completed the sentence disappeared over time and which could not be reconstructed during the general restoration of the villa in 1998. You look in vain for residents of the old mansion on the doorbell signs. Nobody has lived here for a long time. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t come and go here all the time. Even the Bavarian Prime Minister was there recently.
The offices in the Art Nouveau villa are modern.
(Photo: Claus Schunk)
Lawyers and tax consultants have their offices in the Villa Franziska and “The Answer” awaits visitors right at the top under the roof. A head-high, colorful giraffe with a black wig right next to the door gives an idea: This is where creative people are at home. “The Answer” is a TV production company that mainly produces articles for magazines. Alex Hintermoser’s company has been resident here for two years; before that, the company was based in Munich for 18 years. Hintermoser is enthusiastic about its new business premises, from the address with the addition “Villa Franziska” before the street name. “It’s so cool,” he says. The fact that the 47-year-old was actually able to find accommodation here with his company was also due to the possibility of renting a room in the cellar of the neighboring house for the film editing. The villa and the living room are connected underground. “In the past, our landlord used this cellar as a warehouse,” says Hintermoser. The large decorative giraffe was also parked there. The landlord bequeathed them to Hintermoser to move in. “Since then, our editing suite has been called the giraffe room,” he says, even if the animal is now watching over the ten-person editorial staff in the large loft under the roof.
As a rule, the contributions are planned and prepared here. The shooting takes place at home and abroad for major German TV stations such as ZDF, Sat.1, SWR, ProSieben, Servus TV and RTL, “told in people, often stories of fate,” says Hintermoser. Image films, product presentations or event videos can also be commissioned at Villa Franziska. In the past local election campaign, for example, the CSU mayoral candidate in Unterhachingen took advantage of this offer, and the local butcher’s shop was also staged. Hintermoser thinks that they are really well integrated in Unterhaching. Also because his people are sometimes looking for interview partners in the nearby town center.
From the outside: the ornate facade shows a figure of Mary.
Image: Claus Schunk
From the inside: A head-high, colorful giraffe with a black wig right next to the door gives an idea: This is where creative people are at home.
Image: Claus Schunk
A predominantly locally operating company is not “The Answer” as a result. Anyone who recently saw the black limousines pull up in front of the villa will be able to confirm that. It was a big order from “Bild TV”, during the so-called Corona consultation hours, interviews were held with Prime Minister Markus Söder, the virologist Alexander Kekulé and the entrepreneur Carsten Maschmeyer, among others. For this, Hintermoser and his team had to completely rearrange everything so that in the end the editorial team looked like a television studio. “Mr. Söder liked it, he said it was something different,” says Hintermoser. However, nobody was allowed to move in the room during the recordings. Because the old plank floor creaks terribly if you only take one step.
The floorboards are hidden under a carpet and the walls are white, like in any other office. Only the shapes inside the building remind you that you are in an old, listed villa. Here a bay window, there tiny windows, the niche in which the Bosnian editorial dog Flero has his place. As a tenant you are not allowed to change anything because of the monument protection. “We are not even allowed to drive a nail into the wall,” says Hintermoser.
When the Unterhachingen architect and building contractor Eduard Viola bought the villa more than 20 years ago, it was pretty shabby. Little was left of the former glory. It was built in 1903 by the local economist and real estate agent Georg Fischer, as the former home nurse Rudolf Felzmann writes in his Unterhachinger Heimatbuch. Fischer is said to have been an enterprising man who initially worked as a horse farmhand and was listed as a milk merchant in the local directory. However, he did not stop at delivering the milk to Munich with his horse and cart, but began trading in real estate. He had the Art Nouveau villa built by the architect Josef Noll, “a splendid example of sophisticated architecture”, as Werner Reindl noted in 2010 in his home book “Memories of the Settlers”. Ornaments from flora and fauna such as the large peacocks on the corner tower, delicate stucco work and the ornate balcony balustrade are typical of Art Nouveau. The period at the beginning of the 20th century in Unterhaching is considered to be the second phase of local development. The construction of the railway line made the village attractive to wealthy Munich residents.
However, Fischer did not want to live in his newly built villa, he sold the house with the large garden two years after completion for 20,000 marks to Major Eugen Brunnhuber, since then the villa has been named after his wife Franziska. House number 99 was the address at that time. The Brunnhubers lived in the Villa Franziska for 15 years, then sold to Wilhelm and Barbara men who stayed for only one year and in 1920 sold the 3,400 square meter house on the park-like property for 65,000 marks to the Brock family, who ran a beverage trade. Until then, all Art Nouveau frescoes and ornaments are said to have been white. It is said that Frieda Brock had beetles, roosters, peacocks and Madonna painted in color in the 1960s. The name of the property remained, even if it was popularly referred to as the “Brock Villa”. Villa Franziska has been a listed building since 1980.
When the architect Viola bought it from Karl Josef Brock in 1998, it had been empty for a number of years. “The masonry was crumbling, the windows were rotting, the interiors were totally neglected,” says Reindl’s homeland book. The report alone is said to have cost 20,000 marks at the time, the extensive renovation almost a million. The large garden disappeared and houses were built around the villa. Viola would have guessed that not everyone would like the change. The architect died a few years ago, the saying he had painted under the Madonna has remained: “No thing is made so beautiful, there comes a mocker who laughs at it. If you had come here earlier, I would have taken advice from you, so go there and be silent, everyone builds it as he wants. “