The house was built around 1420: two storeys of sandstone with two half-timbered storeys above, standing just inside the Tiergärtnertor at the foot of the castle rock. Albrecht Dürer acquired it in 1509, at the height of his career, and lived and worked here until he died in 1528. It is the only surviving 16th-century artist’s house in northern Europe.
Be clear about what is original. The house was severely damaged in the raid of 2 January 1945 — the north and west façades were torn open — but the timber frame survived, and it was repaired and reopened as a museum in 1948/49, with a full restoration in 1970/71. The two furnished living rooms were fitted out in 1880 in what the 19th century thought Dürer’s time had looked like. The kitchen on the first floor, with its large original hearth, is the room that genuinely shows you how a wealthy Nuremberg household worked in 1500.
The painting and print workshop is the best part and the reason to time your visit. Historical techniques are demonstrated and explained here, and the large letterpress is run several times a day, so you can watch a Dürer woodblock actually being printed rather than read about it.
Upstairs, the Dürer Hall carries a permanent display with the deliberately blunt title “Original kopiert!” — the best of the city’s collection of painted copies after Dürer. The originals of those pictures are in Vienna, Munich, Madrid and Florence, and the museum’s argument is that the copies are historical objects in their own right. Original Dürer prints are shown in the gallery rooms alongside a multimedia introduction, Albertus Durer Noricus.
An actress plays Dürer’s wife Agnes on scheduled costumed tours; the museum’s own calendar lists the dates. Outside, the Tiergärtnertorplatz in front of the house is one of the few corners of Nuremberg that still reads as a medieval square.
