Trippstadt House

Trippstadt House is an 18th-century baroque manor in the village of Trippstadt, set among rolling hills in the Landkreis Kaiserslautern. Built of red sandstone, the single-winged building stands 48 metres long and 18 metres high, with two storeys above a basement. Above the entrance a sandstone relief shows the combined coat of arms of the Hacke and Sturmfeder families, its owners when the house was completed in 1766. The front gable bears the same date and the names of Franz Karl Joseph von Hacke and his wife Amöna Marie Charlotte Juliane Sturmfeder von Oppenweiler. Nearby, the Quellbachhübel once supplied water through a 300-metre tunnel called the Well Tunnel, now a protected monument. The house is worth the journey for its layered history and the figures who shaped it. Architect Sigmund Jacob Haeckher designed the building in 1767 as a country retreat for the Palatine hunting master Franz Karl von Hacke. In 1776 physicist Johann Jakob Hemmer installed the Palatinate’s first lightning conductor here. Landscape architect Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell created a French garden around 1780 and extended it into the scenic Karlstal valley. After damage by Revolutionary troops in 1794 and later changes of ownership, the Kingdom of Bavaria turned the house into a state forestry office in 1885 and opened a forestry school in 1888. Visitors find the red-sandstone façade with its heraldic reliefs and the date 1766 above the door. Inside, the preserved Well Tunnel leads from the spring chamber to the castle well, a reminder of the house’s water supply system. The surrounding gardens, once a French formal layout by von Sckell, now form a public recreation area with the Moosalb stream flowing through the extended Karlstal valley. The building has housed forestry institutions since the 19th century, and today it is home to the Forest Research Institute of Rhineland-Palatinate.