Robinson Crusoe House

Robinson Crusoe House is a stepped-gabled house on Böttcherstraße in the old town district of Bremen, Germany. It was built by the prosperous coffee merchant Ludwig Roselius who admired the pioneering spirit of Daniel Defoe's fictional hero Robinson Crusoe.

In 1931, the Robinson Crusoe House and the Atlantis House opposite completed the construction of buildings in Böttcherstraße. The coffee merchant Ludwig Roselius, who envisioned and financed the Böttcherstraße project, had himself proposed the design which was developed by Karl von Weihe. The interior was designed by the architects Eduard Scotland and Alfred Runge. Roselius chose the name in memory of the novel by Daniel Defoe from 1719 whose hero was the son of a Bremen merchant who had settled in York. He admired the pioneering Robinson Crusoe for his Hanseatic spirit. Roselius foresaw a rather conventional Lower Saxony brick building with a stepped gable. The house stood at the Martinistraße end of the street with a straight-gabled building on the opposite corner. A curved opening supported by a column in the lower corner of each building is a special feature.

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