Holiday home in Juodkrante, Miško street

Holiday home in Juodkrante, Miško street

In the second half of the 19^th century, as Juodkrantė was turning into a resort, a continuous block of villas started appearing: some of these buildings have even survived to this day. Together with similar buildings that remained in Smiltynė, they form the largest collections of the German resort architectures of the 19^th – 20^th century in our country. Though Juodkrantė holds a lot of examples of interesting villas, however, one of such expressive buildings stands at the very end of the current Miško street – the buildings of “Vila Maria” and the Bachmann hotel, having appeared here towards the end of the century, were later joined into a general complex. Later on, during the interwar, the complex was known as the “Forst-Hotel”.

The eclectic nature typical of the Historicism period reflects in both buildings: a fachwerk structure, quite rare to the Curonian Spit, was used in the great, eastern wing, the turrets, design of the balcony structures is typical of the early “homeland style”, abundantly used in the resort architecture at that time. We may find hints of the later at the much more modest western wing: though the plastered brick building with its volume and modest  neo-Classicistic expression reminds of the smaller urban houses of that time, but the expression typical of the resort is conveyed through richly decorated wooden balconies. The pavilion having joined the two buildings in the beginning of the 20^th century has not survived: currently the buildings are connected by a modern extension.

Detail