The liberators preferred central heating and built-in cupboards to idyllic cognac-brown arbors.
Vines, picket fences and pergolas, all nicely painted along the wall, disappeared under a light coat of paint, which was fashionable at the time.
When the American officers moved into Frankfurt's Westend in 1945, not far from the former IG Farben building that became the American headquarters, the residents only had two hours to pack a few things.
The barbed wire of the restricted area ran through the middle of Wolfsgangstrasse.
Eva Maria Magel
Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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The Steinhausen family also had to move out, as did the neighbors on the right.
When they got their houses back, the familiar paint job was gone.
Only now, 70 years later, is it reappearing thanks to a refurbishment: brown slats, an optical illusion, adorn the stairwell.
In the semi-detached house at Wolfsgangstraße 150/152 you should feel like you are in a vine arbor in the summer.
In any case, people lived close to nature back then when the two painter friends Wilhelm Steinhausen (1846-1924) and Hans Thoma (1839-1924) moved into the houses designed by the architect Simon Ravenstein in 1886: the city was closed behind the painters' houses End.
Today there is the most beautiful old building in West End.
Sometimes Constantin Paquet receives families from the neighborhood who know it as little as many other Frankfurters:
that in the partially inhabited property, which looks like a completely normal residential building, Frankfurt's possibly most discreet museum is hidden.
It has been dedicated to the memory of Steinhausen for 35 years.
The painter, who came from Brandenburg and has been based in Frankfurt since 1876, was once known for large-format, primarily religious paintings and as a church decorator. He also painted many of the homes of well-heeled upper class people.
The Lukaskirche in Sachsenhausen, which he designed from 1913 to 1918, was destroyed in the Second World War, but his fresco with ancient and Christian motifs in the auditorium of the Gagern-Gymnasium has been preserved.
Among other things, Steinhausen was successful with prayer book pictures.
His bourgeois portraits were very popular, and his landscapes are still captivating today.
After difficult beginnings, the prolific Steinhausen found success.
If you look around the salon on the ground floor as if you were visiting the family, you will learn that his children and his wife served as motifs for the painter again and again, Rose Livingston can also be seen,
Neighbor Jens Giessen thinks it's great that he lives next to a museum.
Even active in the art and frame trade and related to the former Thoma gallery owner Gottfried Andreas, who bought the house after Thomas Wegzug in 1899, it is a "mercy" for him to live in one of the former artists' houses, whose history and stories he are so familiar.
He can still remember the painter's daughters, who lived in the house until the late 1970s and early 1980s and cherished their father's memory.
The houses bear witness to the close friendship between the painters Thoma and Steinhausen.
They even painted them almost the same, as the uncovered remains show.
Giessen was able to uncover a flower arrangement, possibly painted by the former landlady Cella, wife of the painter Hans Thoma.
Whether there were flowers from the hand of the flower painter Cella in the neighboring Steinhausen?
Nothing was found.
The Steinhausen Foundation only keeps a porcelain plate decorated by her.
Today, the foundation runs the house on a voluntary basis, which was founded in 1978 by the Steinhausen daughter Rose (1891–1983) and has close ties to the family.
Paquet, as its managing director, and Maraike Bückling, the foundation's chairperson, are also the painter's great-grandchildren.
After Rose's death, the city took over the rest of the house, and it was renovated before the museum opened in 1987 - albeit not with the colors and materials of the past that Rose and Ida had received.
Now an overhaul of the house was due - also in order to be able to present in more detail what it contains in the future.
Around 130,000 euros have so far flowed into the restoration of the staircase and the upper rooms, says Paquet;
the German Foundation for Monument Protection, the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Hesse, and the City's Cultural Office and Real Estate Office all helped.
The stairwell, for example, which is already finished, smells strongly of linseed oil again, the painting is visible again.
The ground floor, the heart of the small museum with furniture, paintings, books and photographs, is also to be renovated within two years.
Although the studio on the upper floor, one of the few surviving ones from the 19th century, should probably be considered the “heart”.
Where Steinhausen's brushes, sketches and his archive cabinet can still be seen today, as if he had just left the room.
Neighbor Giessen, born in 1941, often went there as a boy.
Above all, the resolute Rose - "she meant well" - gave him "lessons in Steinhausen", based on the works that the daughters archived at the time.
The family persistently collects scattered objects, and over the years a number of works have been added to the collection of paintings.
Some of the small-format landscapes made by Steinhausen for his wife Ida, called "Mother's Gallery" by the family, are also available.
Views of what hangs in larger formats in museums, also in Frankfurt.
No visitors can come until the first renovations are soon to be completed, but a loan from the Steinhausen-Haus can be seen in the main customs office of the Museum für Moderne Kunst in the "Museumcircle" exhibition until March 20th: Ida am Fenster, created around 1900.
The Steinhausen-Museum Frankfurt, Wolfsgangstraße 152, can only be visited by prior arrangement. Information at steinhausen-stiftung.de