What is the Behrens House?
The Behrens House — Haus Behrens — was designed by Peter Behrens as his personal residence and creative manifesto. Behrens had trained initially as a painter and had been a founding member of the Munich Secession before turning to architecture and design. When Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig invited him to join the Darmstadt colony in 1899, Behrens had never designed a building. The house was his first architectural work, and he approached it with the ambition of someone who had spent years thinking about architecture without yet having built anything.
The programme was straightforward: a family house for Behrens, his wife, and their children, to be designed in time for the colony's inaugural exhibition in 1901. What Behrens produced was anything but straightforward. He designed not just the building but everything within it — furniture, light fittings, silverware, textiles, ceramics, and the family's clothing. The house was exhibited as a complete environment, visitors moving through it as they would a gallery installation, experiencing the relationship between architecture and domestic objects as Behrens intended it to be.
The house survives today, though it was severely damaged during the Second World War. The exterior walls — including the clinker pilaster strips and glazed ceramic tiles — remain largely intact, and the exterior continues to communicate the essential character of Behrens's design.
Facts panel
Private residence designed for Peter Behrens, Mathildenhöhe artists' colony, Darmstadt. Designed 1900–01, completed 1901.
- Architect: Peter Behrens (also responsible for all interior design and furnishings)
- Client: Peter Behrens (his own home)
- Completed: 1901
- Address: Alexandraweg 26, 64287 Darmstadt, Germany
- Plan form: Approximately square; three storeys
- Structure: Masonry
- Materials: Red-brown iron clinker brick; green-glazed facing bricks; plain plaster render; ceramic tiles
- Architectural style: Jugendstil / Art Nouveau; transitional to early Modernism; Gesamtkunstwerk
- Original use: Private residence of Peter Behrens
- Current use: Private residence; part of the Mathildenhöhe UNESCO World Heritage Site
- Designation: UNESCO World Heritage Site (as part of Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, 2021); listed monument, Hesse
Architect: Peter Behrens
Peter Behrens (1868–1940) was born in Hamburg and trained as a painter at art schools in Hamburg, Düsseldorf, and Karlsruhe before settling in Munich, where he became a founding member of the Munich Secession in 1893 and a contributor to the journal Pan. His early work was in painting, printmaking, and book design — he had no architectural training when he was invited to Darmstadt and no built work to his name.
The Behrens House changed everything. The experience of designing a complete environment — working simultaneously at the scale of a building and at the scale of a teaspoon, and understanding both as expressions of the same formal principles — transformed his understanding of what architecture could be. He left Darmstadt in 1903 and moved to Düsseldorf, where he became director of the Kunstgewerbeschule, applying the same integrative philosophy to design education.
In 1907 two things happened simultaneously that would define the next decade of his career: he was appointed artistic director of AEG in Berlin — the role in which he would design the AEG Turbine Factory (1909) — and he became one of the founding members of the Deutscher Werkbund, the reformist organisation that argued for the integration of art, craft, and industrial production as a matter of national cultural significance. The Behrens House is the origin of both: the Gesamtkunstwerk idea that Behrens developed on the Mathildenhöhe is what he brought, at industrial scale, to AEG.
The three architects who would define twentieth-century modernism — Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier — all worked in Behrens's Berlin office in the years between 1907 and 1911, while the AEG Turbine Factory was being designed and built. The line from the Behrens House to the Turbine Factory to the Bauhaus is direct and continuous.
For Behrens's full biography, his AEG work, and his later career, see our dedicated Peter Behrens architect guide.
Architectural character: clinker, ceramic, and the curved gable
The Behrens House is a three-storey near-square villa whose character is defined by the contrast and interplay of its materials. The walls combine red-brown iron clinker bricks — dense, dark, and powerfully textural — with green-glazed facing bricks set against areas of pale plain plaster render. This is not conventional masonry composition; it is closer to the logic of decorative arts, where colour, surface, and texture are composed with the same care as form and proportion.
The curved gables to the north and west are the building's most distinctive silhouette element. They rise to a rounded, almost ecclesiastical profile — more reminiscent of Dutch or North German late-Gothic gable forms than of contemporary Jugendstil — giving the house a vertical emphasis and a slightly monumental presence that sets it apart from the more decoratively exuberant work of Olbrich elsewhere on the Mathildenhöhe.
The entrance on the front façade is the building's most elaborated moment. Set deep within a stepped clinker brick frame, it is framed by stylised eagle-wing ornamentation — a motif that recurs in Behrens's graphic and applied work of this period and that connects the architectural element to the broader decorative programme of the house. Above the western entrance lintel runs an inscription: 'Sei fest, mein Haus, im Toben der Welt' — 'Be steady, my house, amid the roaring of the world' — a phrase that reads simultaneously as domestic motto and architectural programme.
The front façade, which the Chisel & Mouse model captures from entrance to the apex of the roof, presents the full argument of the building in a single composition: the material contrast of clinker and render, the deep-set entrance with its ornamental frame, and the curved gable rising above. It is a façade that rewards close reading — every element is considered, and the relationship between them is precise.
The Gesamtkunstwerk: a house as total design
The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk — the total work of art — had its origins in the music dramas of Richard Wagner, who argued that opera could fuse music, poetry, theatre, and visual art into a unified aesthetic experience. By the 1890s, architects and designers in Vienna, Munich, and Berlin were applying the same idea to the domestic interior: the house as a complete environment in which every object was designed as part of a single whole.
Behrens took this idea further than almost anyone. Inside the Behrens House, every element was designed by him personally: the music room with its dark, weighty furniture and meticulously crafted decorative scheme; the dining room with its lighter white furnishings accented with deep red; the cutlery, the ceramics, the textiles, the light fittings. Nothing was purchased off the shelf. The house was both a home and a demonstration — a proof of concept that the applied arts, practised with sufficient seriousness and formal discipline, could constitute a complete and coherent environment.
This idea — that architecture and design are a single discipline, that the building and its contents answer to the same formal logic — is the idea that Behrens brought to AEG in 1907, and that Gropius brought to the Bauhaus in 1919. The Gesamtkunstwerk of the Behrens House is the philosophical origin of both.
