Mielenforst Castle (Köln)

Gut Mielenforst is a manor house and former knight's seat in the Dellbrück district of Cologne. Today, after extensive renovation, it is used as a condominium complex ("Hofgut Mielenforst"). Gut Mielenforst is located on the edge of the Königsforst forest, by the Eggerbach stream and not far from the Mauspfad. The name is said to be derived from the Celtic "mil" = soft, swampy.

As early as 1196, a Konrad de Milinvorst was mentioned as "dapifer" (Latin: "provider of food" = seneschal) to the Count of Berg. A family of Milenvorst has been known since the 13th century. In the 15th century, the property reverted to the Counts or Dukes of Berg. In 1596, it was pledged to a knight named Heimbach called Hoen; at the end of the 17th century, it was owned by the von Steinen family, who held it until 1774 and had a new manor house built in 1711. Afterwards, it fell to the state and remained a domain.

In 1822, the Cologne notary Dr. Friedrich Hohenschutz acquired the estate with approximately 350 acres of land. In 1882, the textile industrialist Paul Andreae from Mülheim bought the estate from his daughter Josephine and her husband Franz Wilhelm Freiherr von Saint-Remy zur Biesen, which by then included approximately 750 acres of forest, pastures, and arable land. Andreae had the current manor house built by 1885 and gradually had the old farmstead demolished and replaced with historicizing new buildings. In 1904, the estate was converted into a family fideicommissum, and in 1909, the Andreae family was elevated to hereditary nobility by Emperor Wilhelm II.

After the end of the First World War, the New Zealand Rifle Brigade

of the British occupation force had its headquarters at Gut Mielenforst. A photo shows the later Edward VIII as Prince of Wales during a visit on January 18, 1919.

During the Second World War, Gut Mielenforst was an anti-aircraft control center for Cologne on the right bank of the Rhine. The tower, stripped of its helmet for flight safety reasons of the Cologne-Ostheim air base, was used as an observation tower. In the cellar of the administrator's house, soldiers painted office scenes, anti-aircraft guns, and a city panorama of Cologne framed by anti-aircraft searchlights on the walls. Beyond the pond, a deep bunker with two entrances was built in the park.

The Andreae heirs sold Gut Mielenforst to the city of Cologne in 1978. While the park was already placed under nature protection in 1959, Gut Mielenforst was included in the list of monuments of the city of Cologne (No. 669) in 1980. From 1988, the city tried to sell the estate, which was realized by transferring it to a development company on April 1, 1997. With the expiration of the lease period on October 31, 1999, the agricultural use of the estate also ended. The farmstead was converted into a commercial and 47 residential units by 2003 and transformed into partial ownership (planning: Badtke Architektur GmbH; landscape design: Brigitte Röde). The manor house remained undivided (except for the separation of the kitchen wing), and the historic roofscape, especially the helmet of the corner tower, was reconstructed. Buildings, courtyard area, and park are not publicly accessible. However, regular viewing appointments for the public were arranged with the Office of the City Conservator, for example on Open Monument Day.