Tour Report: Rest Home "Fernview"

After visiting our friend Jens and revisiting "his" sanatorium in the Harz mountains, we still had two more days to go on our short tour in March of 2019, so we took the opportunity to visit my mother-in-law and check out a few more locations.

On top of a hill in a small town lies an abandoned rest home. I had seen lots of photos from there, but the most "famous" scene is one room with an old armchair and ferns growing up the wall behind it. So of course, when we were in the area, we had to stop to check it out.

As we drove up to the huge building and saw the broken windows and piles of trash on the outside, we didn't have high hopes to see anything interesting. The place was wide open, so we didn't really go through the trouble of looking for a parking place far away and found one pretty close to the building. Now we only had to find a way in.

There was no fence, and almost every window was broken, so this was an obvious way in - but lazy as we are, we looked for an open door, and we found one right away!

As we entered, we were once again shocked and amazed what vandals can do to a building. There was no single room in its original condition, all remaining furniture had been moved around - either to create the better photo, or to create the better party room, or simply to create chaos. There had even been a fire in some of the rooms, and local kids apparently also used the place as "canvas" for their "graffiti"...

We still took the time and walked through the entire place, and we even managed to get some pretty decent shots - although the vandalism was omnipresent. And then we found the room with the ferns on the wall.

Well, that was a bit disappointing. Firstly because the armchair had lost one of its "arms", but mostly because the ferns weren't nearly as green as we had expected. Yes, it was March, and spring hadn't really started yet, but I suspected that the reason was the immensely hot and dry summer of 2018 that had dried up a lot of the plants.

So after about two and a half hours, we went back to the car and drove off to the next location.

To find out about the history of this place and to check out all the photos, click the button below.

Tour Report: Rest Home "Wasted Years"

From the abandoned chapel, it was only a few hundred meters to the abandoned retirement home, so it was only a short drive. There was a public parking lot right across the street, so that's where we parked the car and got our gear together for a longer exploration. The chapel was small, but being a former military facility, the rest home was a pretty big place, so we took a little more stuff with us.

There was a boom gate at the main driveway, but it was open. There were no fences and no signs that the access was prohibited, which is probably the reason that this place appears to be frequently visited by lots of different people - but I'll get to that.

Toeppi from "Fotodokumentationen" and I didn't really have a plan where to go first, so we just went from one building to the next and checked if it was worthwhile to explore. We found the kitchen and a dining hall, a water bunker for fighting fires, a heating plant - and of course, a lot of rooms where the senior citizens lived.

Especially the residential buildings offered a few memorable sights: Right behind the main doors, we found beautiful tile mosaics which depicted cities in the area that the individual houses were named after. These houses looked like large bungalows and had probably been built sometime in the 1970s. The flat roofs predestined these buildings for water damage - and the water damage took care of the decay. It was beautiful!

As I've mentioned, the area was far from being fenced off, and since it was a beautiful sunny Sunday, there were a lot of people around. We saw other urbexers, graffiti sprayers "working" on the walls of the heating plant, people walking their dogs or just taking a stroll and a lot of families with small children - the place must be like an adventure playground for kids... One of the families had decided to make the theater their playground. This theater is one of the most beautiful rooms in the entire place, but they didn't think to move; the children kept running around, so we decided to go on without taking photos there and check out the small indoor pool before leaving for our final location.

That summer, I returned together with my wife and managed to check out the rooms that Toeppi and I had missed this time - we even found the air-raid shelter in the basement, but that's a story for another blog post :)

To find out about the history of this place and to check out all the photos, click the button below.

Villa Woodstock

What a great place this was! Beautiful architecture and colors! I had seen this on a bunch of photos and when my wife and I were in the area, of course we had to try and go for a visit.
This was actually the second try. Two days before, we met up with a friend and wanted to pay a visit to this old villa, but there was no chance to get in - even the old "it doesn't look like it's open, but it is"didn't work. So at the time, we opted for a different location - the Cookie Factory.
The first attempt was on a Friday, so I said to my wife that we should try again on Sunday, because between Friday and Sunday is - exactly - Saturday! And it seemed to me like a fairly safe bet to assume that sometime between Friday and Sunday someone eventually was going to "find" an opening.
And I was right. We returned early Sunday morning and found an open window through which we squeezed into the basement.
We were not disappointed, the place was really beautiful and at the time completely free from vandalism.
At first, we were alone and had the building for ourselves, but after a while, another group of photographers came along. They told us that on the balcony of the neighboring building a guy was standing and filming everything and had yelled at them for trespassing, but no police came and we continued our eploration.
After about two and a half hours, we left the beautiful old villa and drove on to our next adventure...