Hermesvilla

The Hermesvilla is a historic palace in the Lainzer Tiergarten, a large, fenced-in nature reserve in Vienna's 13th district. Emperor Franz Joseph I had the complex built between 1882 and 1886 to designs by Karl Freiherr von Hasenauer, in order to give his wife, Empress Elisabeth, a retreat from the strict court ceremonial. The villa takes its name from a white marble statue of Hermes that stands in the garden and was commissioned by the empress herself. The building was conceived as a "palace of dreams" and served the imperial couple as a regular late-spring residence until Elisabeth's tragic death in 1898. After World War I and several changes of ownership, the villa was extensively restored in the 1970s and today serves as an exhibition space for the Wien Museum.

Inside the villa, you can tour the empress's private apartments, which have been restored largely true to the original. On the second floor (the first floor above the ground floor in European usage) you'll find the gymnastics room, where Elisabeth carried out her exercises, as well as the bedroom, which is furnished with an ornate Baroque bed from the era of Maria Theresa and wall paintings inspired by motifs from Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The interior also includes paintings by prominent artists such as Gustav Klimt and Hans Makart. On the ground floor, the salon, with its reconstructed ceiling painting, invites you to linger. In addition to the living quarters, you can also see the empress's historic stables, which still have their original fittings and once served as a summer stable for the Lipizzaner stallions of the Spanish Riding School.

The grounds outside the villa hold further cultural treasures. A modern sculpture in Carrara marble explores the tension between constraint and freedom that shaped the empress's life. At the time, the surrounding Lainzer Tiergarten also gave the empress the chance to go riding and to bathe in a pond built specially for her. Today the Hermesvilla combines historical significance with cultural use: the Wien Museum regularly presents exhibitions here that appeal to a broad audience.