Karl Lagerfeld’s former Hamburg villa on the block for €10 million

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Jun 26, 2018

First you see his runway shows; then you shop his collections for Chanel, Fendi and his own Karl Lagerfeld, now you can acquire his former villa in the designer’s hometown of Hamburg.

Lagerfeld’s former German home, known as Villa Jako, is up for sale, though its sticker price is far higher than multiple couture gowns. German real estate broker Engel & Völkers is asking 10 million euros for the villa.
 
Located in the elegant Blankenese district of Hamburg, the villa was acquired by Lagerfeld in 1991. Formerly known as Villa Schüler after the shipping magnate who acquired the residence in the 1920s, the building is designed like a Roman villa with fluted columns on its façade. The house was originally designed by architect Walther Baedeker for the millionaire Hermann Witte. Schüler subsequently added a second floor.

After Karl bought the building he renamed it Villa Jako, after his greatest companion Jacques de Bascher, who died in 1989.
 
Lagerfeld hired local art conservator Renate Kant to revamp the villa, adding heavier upholstered pieces in a style he termed, “very Weimar Republic.”
 
Villa Jako is located in 12,000 square meters of grounds, with views of the river Elbe. Lagerfeld only ever stayed in the villa for three months out of the seven years he owned it. However, he photographed the ad campaign for his brand’s scent Jako in the villa, and even shot an entire photo book on its interiors called “Ein Deutsches Haus.”

 
Villa Jako features a grand living room that stretches the length of the structure, much-admired crystal doorways and an upper-floor library.
 
One of fashion’s best-paid designers, Lagerfeld has owned a series of noted residences; from a chateau in Brittany and villas in Monaco and Biarritz to an 18th century townhouse in St Germain and, latterly as his principal residence, a hyper-modern duplex in concrete and silicone on the Left Bank facing the Louvre, which he once described as “like the operating theatre where one brings prematurely born babies.”
 
He was even once commissioned to design a whole country, his homeland Germany, as part of The World, an artificial archipelago in Dubai. A series of some 300 islands, the development was halted after the 2008 financial crisis, and the islands themselves gradually sunk back into the water.