Schloss Varchentin

Schloss Varchentin is a protected former manor house in the village of Varchentin, part of the municipality of Groß Plasten in the Mecklenburgische Seenplatte district. The broad, plastered building stands on an irregular ground plan and was designed by the Swiss-born Hamburg architect Auguste de Meuron in 1847. He drew on English and Venetian Gothic forms, particularly the Tudor style. The silhouette shows parts of the building at different heights, with side towers and battlements. The estate passed to the Grote family in 1875 through marriage, and the last owner from that line was Friedrich Franz Graf Grote. After 1945 the buildings were looted and later used first for refugee housing and then by the state forestry combine as a training academy. A landscaped park designed by Peter Joseph Lenné in 1838 lies in front of the house. It offers long vistas and a clear view down to the lake below the manor. A separate mausoleum, built in 1895 for Adolf Graf von Grote, stands south of the house within the park. Its Neorenaissance façade is finely worked in ashlar stone. Both the park and the mausoleum are protected monuments. After the Second World War the mausoleum was stripped for scrap metal. The future of the estate has been uncertain since 2018. A preservation society once bought the site to create a public and cultural centre, but the purchase was reversed. The buildings and courtyard have since been sold again. Despite the changes in ownership, the Tudor-Gothic manor, the Lenné park and the Neorenaissance mausoleum remain visible reminders of the estate’s 19th-century grandeur.