Town hall in Schladming

The former hunting lodge and residence of the Brazilian branch of the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha family now serves as Schladming’s town hall. It stands in the centre of the market town in the Enns valley of Styria, a three-storey villa crowned by a southern tower and a northern gable. The building was designed by the Coburg court architect Georg Konrad Rothbart and completed in 1884 for Prince Ludwig August of Saxe-Coburg. The house became the family’s main home in 1917 after the fall of Brazil’s monarchy. In 1940 the town bought the villa and converted it into municipal offices. A commemorative plaque marking the building’s Brazilian past was unveiled in 2022. Inside, the ground-floor hunting room survives with its original paintings by Otto Recknagel. A relief of the Brazilian imperial crown appears on the second floor, and the turret library was restored in 2020. Visitors enter a villa built for comfort and display, its brick façade trimmed with stone dressings and crenellated parapets. The roof follows French models while the rest borrows freely from English 16th- and 17th-century styles. The interior still shows Rothbart’s plans and Recknagel’s murals, and the turret room now holds the town’s restored library.