Müllersches Volksbad

The Müller'sches Volksbad is a swimming bath that looks like a palace, and it was built for exactly the opposite clientele. The Munich engineer Karl Müller gave the city the money for it on one condition: that it become a bath for the poor, at a time when most working-class homes had nowhere to wash. The architect Carl Hocheder designed it, construction ran from 1897 to 1901, and it opened on 1 May 1901 as, by the reckoning of the day, the largest and most modern swimming bath in the world. More than a century on it is still a working public pool run by the city utilities, and it is regularly counted among the most beautiful bathhouses in Europe.

Hocheder mixed the new Jugendstil of Munich with Baroque grandeur and deliberate echoes of the Roman thermae and the Turkish hammam. From the Isar embankment the building reads as a picturesque cluster of roofs and gables in pale limestone, dominated by a clock tower some 35 metres high — a tower that was never mere decoration, since it held the water reservoirs that gave the baths their pressure. Inside, the great hall — once the men's pool, 31 metres long — is spanned by a mighty barrel vault that gives swimmers the sense of doing lengths down the nave of a cathedral. Look for the curving staircases that descend into the water, the stucco and marine-themed painting, the bronze figure at the main pool and the sculpted water spouts that feed it. A second, smaller hall, historically the women's pool and still kept a little warmer, has its own more intimate character.

The third jewel is the Roman-Irish steam bath, a sequence of rooms heated to rising temperatures from around 40 to 80 degrees, a bathing ritual borrowed from antiquity and offered here, in 1901, as a matter of public health. Later saunas were added, but the old bath culture still sets the tone. A long renovation between 1972 and 1999 kept the original fittings and detail, so the Volksbad remains a rare case of a Jugendstil interior used daily for what it was built for. Filmmakers have noticed it too: it appears in Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End and Dario Argento's Suspiria.

The setting is part of the pleasure. The bath stands at the foot of Rosenheimer Straße beside the Ludwigsbrücke, where the old city meets the river, with the Deutsches Museum on its island just across the water.

Getting there

The Volksbad is at Rosenheimer Straße 1, on the right bank of the Isar, about 1.1 km from the centre of Munich. Munich Airport (MUC) is about 29 km away. S-Bahn trains stop at Isartor and Rosenheimer Platz, each about five minutes' walk from the bath; tram 17 stops at Deutsches Museum, and trams 16 and 17 serve Isartor.