513 – Oven house from Breitenried/Heitenried Fribourg, 19th Century
The oven house from the Fribourg community of Heitenried stood apart from the farmhouses. It is, however, not a stone building but a timber frame structure.
Unequal sisters
Like the oven house from Oberwangen (312), this one from the Fribourg community of Heitenried also stood apart from the farmhouses. It is, however, not a stone building but a timber frame structure: The foundation sills at the bottom as well as the framing and roofing timbers above form a firm skeleton. The timbers morticed into the posts form the wall – and the baking space is thus surrounded by a simple but effective wooden envelope. Only the rear portion of the building, the oven space, is in masonry. Firewood was stored up in the open roof space and under the long eaves.
Interior life
The round form of the oven was changed to a smaller rectangular one in 1935. The farmer owner, Arnold Brüllhardt (born 1924), still remembers that baking day was every second or third week. There was room for 24 loaves of bread in the oven. Two neighbouring families used the bake house, one of them until 1956, the other until 1970. The oven was also used to dry fruit. The small still and a cider press with which the father, Gottfried Brüllhardt (born 1895), made his rounds of the local farms were kept here. Major washdays also took over the generous workspace in front of the oven. When many agricultural tools and skills disappeared during boom times, the end of the oven house in the Heitenried hamlet of Breitenried was inevitable. Baking is now done in the kitchen or bread is taken out of the deep freeze. The bake oven went cold in 1967; in 2007 the building came to the Ballenberg Open-Air Museum.
Ballenberg
Swiss Open-Air Museum
Museumsstrasse 100
CH-3858 Hofstetten bei Brienz
Opening hours
10 April to 2 November 2025
10 am to 5 pm daily
