Schloss Assenheim

Schloss Assenheim stands beside the Nidda in the Wetterau, its present buildings rising from the remains of a medieval water-burg built by the Münzenberg family in the late 12th century. The site passed through the hands of the Falkensteins and the Isenburgers before the Solms-Rödelheim line acquired it in the 15th century. A new Renaissance residence was erected north of the old stronghold in 1574–75, and in 1786 Count Johann Karl Ernst commissioned the Frankfurt architect Georg Friedrich Mack to create a three-winged Louis-seize palace. The surviving wings show Mack’s intended façade only in part, yet the main block still contains older cellars and walls from the 16th-century house. Inside, the rooms preserve their original Louis-seize decoration, furnished with Solms heirlooms and later purchases such as works by Christian Georg Schütz the Elder and Anton Wilhelm Tischbein. A neogothic archive wing added in 1851 by Maximilian zu Solms now houses family papers and a collection of seals. The park behind the palace was first laid out as an Anglo-Chinese garden in 1786 and remodelled thirty years later by the Frankfurt gardener Franz Heinrich Siesmayer into an English landscape garden. A single ancient magnolia, planted in 1788, towers before the south front; it may be the oldest specimen in Germany. Near the entrance gate stands a three-sided courtyard of 18th-century half-timbered farm buildings, including a stable with a small clock tower added after 1876.