Schloss Laar

Schloss Laar is an early-Classical manor house built about 1790 on the site of a former estate in Laar, a district of Zierenberg in northern Hesse. It stands east of the L 3211 road, roughly 4.4 kilometres north of Zierenberg town centre, within the Habichtswald Nature Park. The house sits at 217 metres above sea level in a wooded valley beside the Warme, a tributary of the Diemel. The estate first belonged to the noble von der Malsburg family, who are recorded as owners in 1322. During the Thirty Years War the valley suffered repeated plundering, yet the house survived to be sold in 1688 and 1691 to Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel. Later owners included the Goddaeus family and, from 1785, the von Hesbergs, whose son Georg became war minister in the Electorate of Hesse. In 1794 Otto Philipp Ludwig von Voigt built the present Classical manor before selling it in 1802 to the textile manufacturer Johann Christian Weiß. The two-storey building has a nine-bay front and a later four-bay extension to the west, both under low hipped roofs. A three-bay dormer crowns the centre of the north front, while the south side shows a two-bay timber-framed dormer above three ground-floor windows and a door. A park nearly 400 metres long stretches southwards along the Warme, ending in a small pond. North of the house a circular lawn is framed by the driveway, and to the east a small cemetery holds graves of former owners and staff. The estate’s old mill, built in 1599, supplied electricity until 1959.