Two Houses at Feldeggweg 3 and 5

About the building

West of Helvetiaplatz, right on the edge of the slope above the Schwellenmätteli, stand two houses that were planned as a pair. They are mirror images of each other, stand not in one line but turned slightly towards each other, and share a rounded, paved forecourt. The client for both houses in 1887 was the Bern merchant Kaspar Streuli. Who designed them is not recorded.

The two apartment houses follow the Tuscan country-house style, a fashion of historicism that took Italian villas as its model. The two-storey rendered buildings have shallow hipped roofs. Their hallmark is the pair of square towers facing each other, three storeys high and set slightly forward of the house fronts. They have a cornice on brackets and Neo-Baroque cast-iron balconies. Cornices, brackets and window surrounds are of sandstone.

The houses no longer look exactly as they did when built. Historical photographs in the Burgerbibliothek show crowning pieces on the towers that were removed from both houses; the dormers have also been changed. Number 5 was hit hardest: in 1968 its façade was "purified", that is, stripped of most of its decoration. Cornices disappeared and the window surrounds were simplified. If you compare the two houses, the difference is easy to see.

The setting is remarkable: the houses belong to the Kirchenfeld building group and form an important part of the urban structure around Helvetiaplatz. Since 1930 they have stood in the line of sight between the Church of Christian Science of 1926 and the Alpine Museum, completed in 1934. Ukraine opened its embassy in Switzerland in February 1993; it is based at Feldeggweg 5. The City of Bern building inventory lists both houses as worthy of protection.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Bauinventar der Stadt Bern: Feldeggweg 3, 5 · Wikipedia (de): Feldeggweg 3, 5 · EDA: Vertretungen der Ukraine in der Schweiz · Wikidata Q125455446