YARD PLANT

Welcome to the Mayor Stroof House. In this audio guide we tell you something about the former courtyard of the Stroof House.

When we step through the courtyard gate into the courtyard of the Mayor Stroof House and walk past the staircase leading down into the vaulted cellar, we are surprised to see that the Stroof House is not a stone house, as the street façade suggests, but a half-timbered house built on a quarry stone base.

When Vilich Abbey built the house around 1720, 1730 for the head of its administration, the Schultheiss, it wanted a representative building with urban charm. In fact, however, this is typical 18th century half-timbered rural architecture, which became common in our Rhenish-Bergisch region at the beginning of the Baroque period.

The house was built as a multi-storey structure. The posts and struts are one storey high and the upper storey protrudes by the width of one beam.

The colour of the timber frame is reddish brown. It is called oxblood, which is rather rare for half-timbering in our region. The so-called "Bergisch green" colour can be found on the shutters and the front doors.

The courtyard, stable and barn doors used to be painted in the same colour. Don't look around now, you won't see the stable and barn, but we'll come to that in a moment. The windows and door reveals are made of trachyte, a type of stone from the Siebengebirge.

The grey tone of the stone can also be found where the window reveals are made of wood. It is intended to simulate the nobler house stone that is typical of urban stone buildings. In places where half-timbering has a rural, rustic appearance.

If we look upwards, we notice the bevelled corner at the top of the gable. This type of roof shape, which can also be found on the other gable, is typical of the Baroque period. It is called a crippled hipped roof.

The roof tiles themselves are not flat, but hollow tiles and are black or slightly dark red in colour due to weathering. The Bürgermeister Stroof House was originally part of a four-winged courtyard complex, similar to a small farm.

At least the carriage and riding horse need shelter and stabling. Let's stand in the centre of the courtyard. It used to be more than twice as wide as it is today and was unpaved. Let's first look at the rear entrance door of the Stroof house.

The windows on the right are just as large as those on the street side, both above and below. And today there is also a larger, higher window to the left of the door. Behind it is the office. If we turn 90 degrees to the left, we see a modern extension with a kitchen, toilet and utility shed.

There used to be a one-and-a-half-storey farm wing in the same cubature. It housed a washhouse and bakehouse, which was adjoined by the cowshed and stables. Above this, under the roof, were simple servants' and maids' rooms.

If we turn further to the left, we now see a brick wall and behind it a more recent residential building. This wall did not exist in the past. Instead, there were more stables, stalls and pigsties and a dung heap in front of it.

Near the corner between the cow and pigsty stood the swivelling water pump from which the cooking and washing water was brought into the kitchen. If we turn 90 degrees again, we are now looking in the direction of Lede Castle, which, with a bit of luck, we can recognise over the wall.

There used to be a relatively large barn here, which almost reached the road. On the site of today's farm gate, there used to be a larger gatehouse with a small, hollow-tiled saddle roof.

The farm buildings were demolished in the 1960s due to increasing decay. Only the residential building could be saved. The property was divided and a brick dividing wall was erected.