Villa Esche.

About Villa Esche

The Villa Esche in the Chemnitz locality of Helbersdorf in Saxony, Germany, is an Art Nouveau villa designed and built by the Belgian architect and designer Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) in 1902/1903 and extended in 1911. The house for the textile entrepreneur Herbert Esche (1874–1962) and his family is considered van de Velde's first commission in Germany, and thus also the begin of modern architecture in Chemnitz. The villa is a Gesamtkunstwerk in the sense of Art Nouveau. Furniture, interior textiles, and everyday objects, all the way down to clothing, are part of it. The small park surrounding the villa was probably designed by van de Velde's wife Maria Séthe. The Esche and van de Velde families were friends for decades. After his expropriation in 1945, Herbert Esche lived the rest of his life in Küsnacht in Switzerland, like Henry van de Velde, where the two visited each other again and again.