Wohnhaus

Schloss Krautheim stands on the edge of the village of the same name in Volkach, a town in Lower Franconia beside the Main. The present building began as a 16th-century monastery farm bought by Friedrich Zollner after the Benedictine abbey at Münsterschwarzach lost its local estates. In 1736 the Freiherren von Buttlar turned the farm into a small country house, and twenty years later the castle passed back to the Counts of Castell. After secularisation in the 19th century the building entered private hands and is now listed by the Bavarian heritage office. The two-storey baroque house wears its 18th-century dress lightly. Half-timbered attic floors sit at either end under a mansard roof, and the windows vary in size, framed by dressed stone. A grand arched gateway was bricked up long ago, and changes in street level plus an imperfect restoration have altered the original look. On the west front two pilasters support a false balcony above the door, its capitals marked 1736, while the keystone above the arch shows a mask. Visitors enter through the west portal and see the alliance coat of arms of Carl Heinrich Gottfried von Buttlar and his wife Anna Juliana Maria Magdalena von Wildenstein. Inside the modest scale and plain finishes recall its farm origins, but the stone doorcase and dated balcony remain clear reminders of the Freiherren who shaped it. The building sits quietly among vineyards, its modest silhouette speaking more of local history than grand display.