Schloss Neunhof

Schloss Neunhof stands at the southern edge of Neunhof village, now part of Nürnberg in Mittelfranken. It is a rare example of a late 15th-century Weiherhaus, a moated manor house whose original timber-frame structure and interiors survive almost unchanged. A small bar­oque park with an octagonal pavilion was laid out in the 18th century and restored twice in the 1960s and 1970s. The whole estate belongs to a public foundation and is closed for major repairs since 2013. The house was begun by Hans Kreß after the First Margrave War and completed around 1479. In 1503 the childless widow sold it to Georg Fütterer, a wealthy merchant who rose to the city council and the patriciate. Fütterer added the steep gables and a stone plinth, turning the modest house into a proper gentleman’s seat. Later owners included the Reich brothers, the Koler family and the Kreß von Kressenstein line, who commissioned the baroque chapel and garden in the 1730s. Visitors once entered through the ground-floor kitchen and climbed to the first and second floors, where rooms still hold original panelling, painted ceilings and a small baroque organ. The park remains open, laid out on a grid of five grass squares with box arabesques and clipped cones on sandstone pedestals. At its centre stands Conrad Schön’s pavilion of 1740, surrounded by clipped plane trees and hedged enclosures that recall the lost art of Nuremberg baroque gardening.