House Heck from Friedensdorf

Built: 1789 
Dismantled: 1979
Reassembled: 1985 to 1987

This two-storey former byre dwelling was part of a three-sided farmstead at its original location. On the ground floor to the right is where the stable was originally located, and the storage cellar was underneath the left part, the parlour. On the farmyard side, three window parapets on the upper floor were decorated with two St. Andrew’s crosses and a diamond. The infills rendered with pargetting on the entrance side and the upper floor of the road-facing gable side are typical features of buildings in the Hinterland north-west of Marburg. The original infills were decorated with stylized flowers, four- and eight-pointed stars and a sun disc.

Johann Ludwig Heck (1756 to 1831), the part-time farmer who originally built the house, put a carpenter’s workshop into the former stable part of the building, which existed until about 1860. His son, Johannes Heck (1785 to 1845), inherited the business and became very well-known later as a gifted joiner. Some of his pieces, valuable as works of art and demonstrations of the craft, are exhibited today in the Museum of Cultural History of the Philipps University of Marburg, located in the Landgraves’ Palace there.

The house was reopened after extensive renovation in November 2021. It now accommodates the permanent exhibition “At home at Hecks”, which sheds light on the everyday life of a family of carpenters around the year 1840.