das Richterhaus

das Richterhaus sits in Scherleinsöd, a hamlet near Untergriesbach in the southern foothills of the Bavarian Forest, close to Passau and right where Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic meet. The forest here has many names, the Bayerwald, the Böhmerwald, the Nordwald, but the Czech one is the best: Šumava, the rushing one, for the sound of the treetops. It's walking and cycling country. The Goldener Steig, a network of old salt-trading paths, runs through it from the Danube to the Vltava, and there are lakes to swim in at Rannasee and Freudensee, climbs up Dreisessel and Lusen, and the Saußbachklamm gorge. In winter there are cross-country trails and snowshoe walks. Passau, the three-rivers city where the Inn, Ilz and Danube meet, is half an hour away.

The house was built in 1670 as an Amtmannshaus, the home of a court official, and four generations of court bailiffs lived here before it passed to craftsmen and smallholders. Then it sat empty for thirty years. Inside the living wing, the original fabric and room structure had never been altered, which is what made the restoration possible in the first place. Work ran from 2020 to 2026, carried out by the family themselves: they laid the floors, plastered the walls, built the furniture and planted the trees. Two of them, Felix Scheuermann and Lea Hailer, run co.nzept, a studio working across architecture, craft and art, and both trained as cabinetmakers before studying. What started with two people ended up as six, all bringing something different. The result keeps the old surfaces and adds quiet modern ones: soft fir, black leather, a masonry stove, a bed built from black multiplex. Time is the material here as much as the stone.