History

Karol Scheibler was the richest of Łódź’s cotton industrialists, his mills and workers’ housing spread along the Jasień river in the district called Księży Młyn. When his daughter Matylda married Edward Herbst around 1875, the family commissioned the city architect Hilary Majewski to build the couple a villa within the estate. Herbst went on to direct the Scheibler company after Karol’s death, and the house tied the two families together.

Majewski designed a one-storey neo-Renaissance villa, later extended with a ballroom, and surrounded it with the apparatus of a wealthy household: an orangery joined to the house by a glass-covered passage, a red-brick carriage house and stables with a tower — this last by Adolf Zeligson — and quarters for servants. The interiors ran from offices and a dining room to an oriental room and a smoking room, with private apartments above.

After the war the villa became a museum, but it was the restoration of 2011–2013 that brought it back: interiors, façades, orangery, stables and coach house were returned to the look of the Herbst years, the outbuildings adapted to display art. The palace is now part of the Museum of Art in Łódź and hangs works by Polish masters including Jan Matejko, Olga Boznańska and Jacek Malczewski.