The ochre-red house at Burgfeld 136, in north Frankfurt, has two large, sunny bedrooms, a deep tub in the bathroom and a maid’s room. The two living spaces, furnished with oak sideboards by Austrian rationalist Franz Schuster, connect to an eat-in kitchen, designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, where everything – from the pantry canisters to the ironing board – is built into the teak cabinetry. It overlooks a long garden with fruit trees and vegetable beds. In short, it’s a place many urbanites would kill for, even though it was constructed 100 years ago on a wave of social idealism and modernist fever.
What is Neues Frankfurt?
Burgfeld was one of 12,000 affordable units in a 1920s housing scheme called Neues Frankfurt, planned by architect Ernst May and mayor Ludwig Landmann, social reformers determined to create lively, high-functioning, green-belt communities for working-class Frankfurters. The tree-lined streets encompassed schools, playgrounds and community centres, operating both as an incubator for the various architects, urban planners and designers involved, as well as offering a ticket to a simpler life. ‘This was the first fully electrified housing estate in Germany,’ says Elisa Lecointe, a Schuster furniture expert who works with the Ernst May Society. And it allowed Schütte-Lihotzky’s influential, compact, low-cost, wood-based ‘Frankfurt kitchen’ to shine. ‘A lot of the older residents still use the original kitchens today,’ says Lecointe.
Presaging model midcentury cities, the experiment was ahead of its time, even if the high-spec tilework, modular furnishings and built-ins pushed rents up beyond the widely affordable. May’s upbeat, functional modernism made him a hero, even in Berlin and Dessau. And it made Frankfurt a Weimar-era hotspot. If the 1929 stock market crash hadn’t kicked off a 15-year nightmare of poverty, political upheaval and war, May and Landmann – both Jews – might not have fled the country. And the Neues Frankfurt project might not have been halted five years into its ten-year timetable. ‘The Nazis hated this architecture,’ says Lecointe. ‘They couldn’t stand that form followed function. They preferred the idea of a British-style garden city – a traditional village with pitched roofs.’ Flat roofs, they said, looked Semitic.
‘When the grand plans for affordable housing were halted in the 1930s due to political and economic changes, not only were concrete projects lost, but important lessons and ideals were also neglected,’ says Matthias Wagner K, director of Frankfurt’s Museum of Applied Arts, and a May expert. That included not only social housing and communal spaces but strategies for sustainable living.
Yet Neues Frankfurt still has thousands of homes to celebrate in its centenary. Some of the units house families that have been in situ for generations, while others are home to arrivistes, drawn to their revolutionary principles and hyper-functionality. ‘Even the door handles by Ferdinand Kramer are sought-after objects,’ says Wagner. ‘Tecnoline now reproduces them with permission from the Kramer family.’
Today, says Lecointe, the rents are far more affordable. ‘The local property authority has a low-cost mandate, and it can only charge a quarter of your salary.’ And that covetable house at Burgfeld 136 has opened to the public as the Ernst May House museum, with plans in the offing for it to be bookable as a B&B.
The scheme’s centenary happened at an auspicious time for Frankfurt. It heralded the city’s turn as World Design Capital for 2026, and events are now kicking off across the Rhine-Main region, intended to demonstrate why the area deserves some of the kudos normally reserved for the design hotbeds of the Bauhaus movement, such as Weimar or Dessau.
Dutch architecture firm UNStudio is launching its sky-skimming live/work scheme Four, touted as a new Neues Frankfurt, with a street-level bar named after Ernst May. A modular pavilion designed by Constructlab will tour the region, hosting talks, workshops and educational programmes. And Hanau, a town to the east that was flattened by Allied raids, will introduce visitors to mobile botanical gardens developed by designer Kai Linke.
The southern suburb of Darmstadt is celebrating its own milestone: it’s 125 years since the artists’ colony (and Unesco World Heritage site) was built in gilded Arts-and-Crafts glory by Peter Behrens and a coterie of Jugendstil artists – it’s worth visiting just for a glimpse of the mosaics in Joseph Maria Olbrich’s bizarre Wedding Tower. If these don’t get people on the U-Bahn, then it’s a safe bet they’ll make the 20-minute journey to the housing estates and market halls that remain from May’s satellite projects.
‘The memory of Neues Frankfurt, of the energy that was mustered in the difficult times of the 1920s, formed not the sole but an important basis for our application for the title of World Design Capital,’ says Wagner K, who led the region’s bid. Now might be a good time to be reminded of an era when progressive thinking was institutionalised, and humanity and hope were central to residential design.
This article appears in the April 2026 Global Interiors Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 5 March 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today