Villa Wunderkind

Villa Wunderkind stands in Potsdam’s Berliner Vorstadt beside Heiliger See, with neoclassical architecture facing the water. Its lake-facing facade combines floor-to-ceiling arched windows with decorative vases set into niches.

A miller’s house occupied the land in 1795, before a street-facing villa appeared during the nineteenth century. Ernst and Wanda Metz expanded the property in 1911, first giving it a country-house character. By 1914, architect Paul Renner had reshaped it into an Italian-style villa and removed the original miller’s house. Its neoclassical form echoes the early classical Marble Palace across Heiliger See.

Karl Otto von Kameke owned the property during the 1920s, while diplomat Ulrich von Hassell occupied it during the 1940s. From 1958 until German reunification, the British Military Liaison Mission used the building as its headquarters, calling it the White Villa. Wolfgang Joop purchased and renovated it in 1999, followed by Josef Paul Kleihues’s postmodern renovation, completed in 2001. The Hasso Plattner Foundation acquired it in 2017 and uses the property as a representative site.