…said Friederike Lauteren (1818–1884) the other week during a garden tour of the Mathildengarten in Nierstein.
No, not a voice from the grave, but that of Barbara Reif who effortlessly slipped into the persona of Friederike, the wife of the original owner of the property, for the tour.
“Of course, I died before my husband, so I have NO IDEA what sort of shenanigans he got up to later on…”
The Lauteren wine merchant family was one of the leading representatives of bourgeois society in Mainz in the 19th century, Christian Ludwig Lauteren (Friederike’s husband) being a co-founder of the German sparkling wine industry.
Alongside being a major investor in the Ludwigsbahn (which ran from Mainz to Worms, with a station in Nierstein for the family’s convenience..) and being instrumental in reclaiming land from the Rhine, later housing the Lauterenviertel with a street named after him.
More history from the trust’s website
The prestigious country residence in Nierstein probably came to the Lauteren family as a dowry.
Around 1861, Christian Ludwig Lauteren commissioned the well-known architect Carl Wetter from the Wetter family of master builders in Mainz to construct the late neoclassical building. Modelled on an Italian Renaissance villa, a building is created that perfectly combines living and representation with the operation of a winery and an orangery.
The famous landscape architect Heinrich Siesmayer was commissioned to design the garden. Siesmayer is considered the most important garden architect of the late 19th century in the Rhine-Main region. The spa gardens of Bad Nauheim and Bad Homburg as well as the gardens of the banker Bethmann in Frankfurt, among others, are due to him. Perhaps his greatest achievement was the founding, planning and construction of the Frankfurt Palm Garden. Siesmayer had his own workshop for trellis work, where he created pavilions, arbours, trellises and verandas. In addition to the surviving tea pavilion of the Mathildenhof, he probably also designed various pavilions that have since been demolished and the trelliswork of the veranda of the house, which connected the park and the house via climbing plants. It can be assumed that the architect and landscape architect worked closely together on the extension of the Mathildenhof.
The Lauteren family has owned the Mathildenhof for three generations. Old festival regulations for community events show that the gardens were often also used by the local population and were made available for festivities. Declining income from the wine trade and loss of ownership of the share packages in the Hessian Ludwig railway at the beginning of the 20th century reduced the prosperity of this important trading family.
After the death of his father, Kommerzienrat Clemens August Lauteren, the community of heirs around Clemens Christian Lauteren sold the estate and its inventory to the large industrialist family, the Freiherrs von Heyl zu Herrnsheim, in 1909.
And later to the Ahr family who placed the property under a cultural protection order in 2023, beat off attempts of the council to bowl it for a subdivision and is slowly but surely returning the building to its original structure (lots of bodged add-ons and add-ons to add-ons..) and returning the garden to Siesmeyer’s original vision, with the loosely structured formal garden contrasting the meticulously geometric French layout of the adjoining vineyard.
And more power to their elbow
Mainz Daily Photo 