Villa at Weststrasse 6

About the building

Looking along the Weststrasse in the Kirchenfeld, you see at the end of the street axis a stone oriel set diagonally on the corner of a cube-shaped villa under a mansard roof. The architect concentrated his means precisely on this corner, because it is the most important one in the view down the street.

The design is by Horace Edouard Davinet; the client was Emil Lüscher-Hofer. The building inventory dates the villa to 1889, Wikidata gives 1898. Davinet, born in 1839 in Pont-d’Ain in France, first made his name as a hotel architect in the Bernese Oberland, for instance with the Beau-Rivage in Interlaken. In 1876 he moved his office to Bern and worked on planning the Kirchenfeld; he is regarded as the author of the district plan of 1881.

The villa stands on a base of hard stone. The ground floor has banded render, the upper floor smooth render, and the cornices, surrounds and panels are of sandstone. The corner oriel is a richly articulated stone structure with a scrolled dormer under a trapezoidal cap, flanked on both sides by shallow projections. On the west side is a stone entrance porch with a terrace and a balustrade of turned balusters; there is also a veranda.

Around 1980 the oriel’s strongly silhouetted roof ornament was removed, and the original zinc decoration on the cap is gone too. The old boundary of the plot, however, survives: a wrought-iron fence on a knee-high wall of squared stone. Look at this fence and at the oriel that closes the view down the street.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Bauinventar der Stadt Bern: Weststrasse 6 · Bauinventar der Stadt Bern: Baugruppe Kirchenfeld · Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz: Davinet, Horace Edouard · Wikipedia (de): Horace Edouard Davinet · Wikidata: Q138783152