Weinforth House

This house on what is now Peterstraße was built in the second half of the 15th century. While its façade is made of brick, the remaining walls are half-timbered, making it the oldest residential building in the town with a stone gable. Its distinctive architecture earned it the name “the Stone House on the Market Square.”

The brick cross on the six-step Gothic gable recalls that the rector of the Holy Spirit Hospital once lived here. The extensive building complex, founded in 1390, was more of a hospice than a hospital in the modern sense.

Behind these two surviving buildings – Weinforth House and the adjacent Holy Spirit Chapel – were houses providing shelter, rather than medical care, for pilgrims, the homeless, the elderly, and the sick.

The legacy of the old Holy Spirit Hospital continues today in Kempen’s modern hospital.