Castle Suresnes, Munich

Castle Suresnes in Munich, Germany is an early 18th-century French‑inspired small château built for a senior official of the Electorate of Bavaria between 1715 and 1718. Its design follows a Parisian model, reflecting the taste for French country houses among Bavarian court circles after the Elector’s period in exile, and the house quickly became a notable private residence in the Schwabing area.

From the mid-18th century the property passed through many private hands. Named owners after 1756 include Johann Leopold Ignatius Freiherr Manteuffel and his wife Maria Clara, Maria Theresia Caroline, Countess von Preysing‑Moos, Friedrich Reichsgraf von Vieregg, Wilhelm Friedrich von Jordan, Ludovica, Reichsgräfin von Kesling, the court appraiser Franz Xaver Haslinger, and Ferdinand von Döllinger. During the early 1800s the house fell into neglect before being bought in 1823 by Friedrich Wilhelm von Jordan, a royal Bavarian chamberlain and lieutenant general; he disposed of the property again in 1839.

Members of the Jordan family maintained links with the house into the 19th century. Mathilde von Jordan is reported to have spent part of her youth there and was portrayed in 1837 for King Ludwig I’s Gallery of Beauties. In 1855 the residence was occupied by Carl August von Steinheil, and the sculptor Elisabet Ney lived and worked at the house in 1869–1870. By the late 19th century the small château had become a favored meeting place for young artists.

In the turbulent years around the First World War the building accommodated artists and politically engaged figures. Painter Hans Reichel took an atelier apartment there in 1918 and became a friend of Paul Klee; Klee used an atelier in the house for three months and is reported to have rented space there until his appointment to teach at the Bauhaus in October 1920. During the short-lived Munich Soviet Republic, Hans Reichel concealed the left‑wing revolutionary writer Ernst Toller in his apartment; Toller had lodged there from May and was arrested on the morning of 4 June 1919 after a denunciation.

At the end of the 1940s the house served as the final workplace of Leo Samberger. The Archdiocese of Munich and Freising acquired the property in 1937, and from 1967 it has been used as the conference centre of the Catholic Academy of Bavaria. The building later served as the residence of Archbishop Reinhard Marx until renovations to the episcopal palace were completed in 2012. The site is listed as a protected architectural monument of Schwabing under file number D‑1‑62‑000‑7428.