Tucherschloss in Feucht

The Tucherschloss stands in Feucht, a village in Mittelfranken. It is one of three surviving patrician castles built by Nuremberg families. The building began as a modest farmhouse in the late 16th century before Herdegen IV Tucher transformed it into a gentleman’s seat. A nearby Baroque garden, replanted in the 18th century to a 1757 plan, adds formal terraces and clipped hedges.

The house reveals how Herdegen Tucher stretched the rules of his 1590 building permit. Instead of leaving the ground floor empty, he installed storerooms, a kitchen and a parlour there. Upstairs, the first floor held the main kitchen, bedchambers and a writing room, while the second floor contained the grand hall called the ‘large taproom’. After the Thirty Years War the family used the house mainly for summer stays, entertaining guests in the pleasure garden with its gardener’s house and summer hall.

Today the castle houses a restaurant, offices and flats. The restored Baroque garden lies just behind the building, its gravel walks and box-edged beds framed by clipped limes. A small summer house still stands in the garden, its painted panelling showing scenes from the 18th century. Visitors can walk from the castle gate along the garden’s central axis to the summer hall, then return past the gardener’s lodge to the village street.