Kurhaus (Heiligendamm)

The Kurhaus Heiligendamm stands in Heiligendamm, a district of Bad Doberan in the Rostock district of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It is a long, plastered hall building with a hipped roof, built between 1814 and 1816 on the orders of Friedrich Franz I. The architect was Carl Theodor Severin. The building belongs to the most important works of North German Classicism under the influence of the Schinkel School and is regarded as the founding structure of spa architecture. The building’s east side faces the Baltic Sea and features a spacious Tuscan-style columned porch topped by a pediment. Flanking the porch are large three-part windows with semicircular windows above. The entablature includes an architrave, a metope and triglyph frieze, and an attic bearing the Latin inscription HEIC TE LAETITIA INVITAT POST BALNEA SANUM. Above this is another attic with a lunette window and, at the top, a triangular gable with a renewed clock whose original mechanism is kept in the Turmuhrenmuseum in Seehausen. In the porch’s lunettes above the windows are white reliefs of tritons and nereids on blue backgrounds in the style of Wedgwood ceramics. At the centre above the entrance is Hygieia, goddess of healing. Nearby stands a granite boulder weighing 220 tonnes, erected in 1843 to mark the 50th anniversary of the seaside spa’s founding. The interior once held four wall panels of printed French scenic wallpaper from about 1840, depicting Swiss mountain panoramas, now displayed in an upper room.