Couven-Museum

The Couven Museum displays on three floors at Am Hof, in the centre of Aachen's old town, the bourgeois domestic culture of the 18th and early 19th centuries. It is named after the Aachen municipal architects Johann Joseph and Jakob Couven, whose rococo and early-classicist interiors define the collection. The house itself, the Haus Monheim, was in the 18th century the town pharmacy of the Monheim family and the birthplace of an early form of the Aachener Printen biscuit. The museum first opened as the Couven Museum in 1929; after wartime destruction it moved in 1958 to its present building at Am Hof, into which whole ceilings, stuccoes and panelling from demolished Aachen patrician houses were installed. The tour shows a complete pharmacy fitting, wallpapered rooms with chinoiserie and the bedroom Napoleon used during his 1804 stay in Aachen.