Kavalierhaus
Gentleman’s house
This beautiful one-storey building, which is considered a historical monument, is located in Breitestraße street. It was built in 1770 and has six rooms.
This house dates from the times of the Frederickian rococo and is one of the oldest historical monuments in Pankow. The heptagonal building with a hip roof and Baroquian stairs recalls courtiers’ houses, the so-called Kavalierhäuser, in spite of the fact that it was built in 1770 as a merchant’s summer residence.
Owners of this house were, among others, the merchant Carl Philipp Möring (1753-1837), who in 1814 installed one of the first steam heating in Germany, and Charles Duvinage (1804-1871), founder of the Hohenzoller library. Between 1866 and 1939 the house belonged to the family of the chocolate manufacturer Richard Hildebrand, that is why it is also called “Hildebrandsche Villa”.
From 1947 onwards, this house was used by the social welfare Groß-Berlin, and from 1959 it was used as a nursery. In 1998 Caritas-Krankenhilfe Berlin e.V. institution bought it and renovated it. An exhibition documents the house’s development. The four copies in the front garden are a symbol of the temperament of the human psyche. The originals were created in the 18th century by Gottfried Knöffler (1715-1779), an sculptor from Dresden, and are to be found at the Bodemuseum sculpture collection.