Schlossgut manor house with garden

En un regard

Le château en bref

The Schlossgut at Pfeffingen is a manor estate east of the castle ruin, on the edge of the rocky escarpment overlooking the village of Pfeffingen (Basel-Landschaft). It originated in the castle's former dairy, housed in a cave on the southern slope, and then in a farm, the Obere Lehenhof, shown on Meyer's plan (1665) and Büchel's map (1754). In 1792, the merchant Zimmerlin of Zofingen converted it into a country residence with a new house and a French-style terraced garden; an English landscape garden was added at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1892, the Basel ribbon manufacturer Rudolf Vischer-Burckhardt bought the estate, had the agricultural buildings demolished, and commissioned, to designs by the architect Fritz Stehlin, a large neo-Baroque manor house (1899): the former residence became the north wing of a horseshoe-shaped forecourt, closed to the east by a gateway, with a service building to the south. Inspired by eighteenth-century French estates, the ensemble, which the cantonal inventory ranks among the finest neo-Baroque works of the late nineteenth century, is protected as a cultural monument. The City of Basel acquired it in 1941; it today houses the Waldschule Pfeffingen, a boys' boarding school.