Abandoned furniture stores are quite rare, I’ve actually never heard of one before. Most of the times they are located near shopping malls and either the direct competition takes over and slams their name on it – or some other giant store is happy about aquiring cheap real estate with lots of selling space. Möbel Erbe was different though – and it ended in a fascinating but sad story about greed and incompetence…
First of all, just in case your German is rusty: Möbel means furniture. So Möbel Walther is a furniture store named after the Walther family, Möbel Kraft was named after the Kraft family and Möbel Erbe… right, after the Erbe family.
Until the mid-2000s the Erbe family owned two huge furniture stores, one in Hanau near Frankfurt (more than 50000 square meters, which equals about 538200 square feet) and one in Schkeuditz near Leipzig (about 25k sqm). There might have been a third store, but more likely is that some authors were confused by stores of the same name or by not knowing much about geography. (E.g. Dölzig is near Schkeuditz, but it’s highly unlikely that Möbel Erbe would have run two stores of that size within five Kilometers of each other.) It was generally tough to find information about the company’s history, specifics about furniture stores are not exactly popular a topic on the internet…
What I was able to find out was that in 2000 Möbel Erbe expanded their original company home with a 5-storey, 30000 sqm building right across the street and connected it with a glass bridge. The so-called “Eurostore” aimed at a younger audience, kind of an IKEA clone. Successfully, according to news reports from 2002, when owner Thomas Erbe was awarded the “OSKAR für den Mittelstand” (OSKAR for Small and Medium Sized-Businesses”) by the Oskar Patzelt Foundation; kind of the Academy Award of enterprises in Germany – which is why the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sued… and settled out of court after seven years in 2005, with the prize being renamed to “Großer Preis des Mittelstandes” (Grand Prize of Small and Medium Sized-Businesses). Erbe reportedly was chosen from almost 1000 companies after being nominated four times in previous years. Basically a rock-solid company from all I know, with more than 100 Million Euros revenue per year…
In 2005 strange things happened… In February media reported that the furniture store chain “Sconto” was trying to get permission to build another store in Großaurach near Hanau, but residents and politicians there voiced opposition. Sconto belongs to Kurt Krieger, who also owns Möbel Kraft, Möbel Walther as well as Höffner – plus probably some more, but the company structure is complicated and at least one of his daughters, Sonja Krieger, is in the business, too; acting indepedently, of course. Anyway, Sconto in Großaurach near Hanau wasn’t going to happen and so on July 1st Höffner announced the acquisition of Möbel Erbe out of nowhere; Kurt Krieger in control of Hanau, Sonja Krieger in control of Schkeuditz; and Thomas Erbe told a newspaper that he considered himself responsible personally that nobody gets fired.
Three weeks later Sonja Krieger announced that Möbel Erbe in Schkeuditz would be closed due to the store’s catastrophic economical situation she said she wasn’t aware of before… Yeah, right. Daddy’s in the furniture business since 1967 and is #2 right behind IKEA in Germany and they had no clue what they were buying… so they had to close… by the end of August! Right. But it gets worse!
Four weeks after the aquisition of Möbel Erbe in Hanau and just one week after his daughter fired 120 people in Schkeuditz (the Krieger family conglomerate owned two gigantic stores nearby and didn’t offer any of the former Erbe employees jobs there…) Kurt Krieger announced that Möbel Erbe in Hanau would be closed. But he wasn’t in a rush. While his daughter gave her employees only five weeks notice, “Karate Kurti” was nicer and gave them seven weeks… The reasons given? Same as is in Schkeuditz, the catastrophic economical situation of the store. This time 230 employees were fired, despite (or because of…) the fact that the Krieger family owned two other mega stores less than a dozen kilometers away from Möbel Erbe in Hanau, which was closed in mid-September. But it gets worse!
On December 27th a Sconto furniture store opened in Hanau… in the building formerly occupied by the Eurostore. Yes, in the exact same Möbel Erbe extension Kurt Krieger bought along with the main building… and whose employees he fired just four months prior! Oh, BTW, according to media reports Kurt Krieger’s personal fortune is about 600 million Euros…
(This is the story how I pieced it together from about two dozen news reports I found online. If any former employee or other insiders know more about the story please feel free to correct me or add bits and pieces!)
Eight years after the main store was closed, it is still empty and in worse shape than ever. The latest media reports about the completely vandalized building are from 2011, stating that Kurt Krieger suggested several business plans about food retail and electronic stores, all of which were declined by the Hanau city council, which decided in 2005 that they won’t allow any other retail stores on the premises in an attempt to proctect retailers in downtown Hanau from mega stores in the outskirts. So the inevitable happened and airsoft players, graffiti sprayers and vandals took over.
Interestingly enough I had never heard of the abandoned Möbel Erbe Furniture Store before, despite its quite exposed location – it was actually my sister who spotted it from the car when we were on our way to some closed / abandoned military bases in Hanau, including the *Pioneer Kaserne* I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. For some reason the place doesn’t seem to be very popular with German urban explorers… but I actually enjoyed it. Sure, there was not much to see and the huge storage in the back was partly demolished already, but if you had a closer look you could find some interesting things, like the almost completely broken window front or a couple of items like old order forms and left-behind 5.25” floppy disks. Möbel Erbe probably would have been a disappointment if it was supposed to be the exploration highlight of the day, but as an original find it was a perfect snack on the way to other locations…
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Abandoned Kansai 
Aside from the incredible size of this building complex, I’m amazed at how much paint was used by the vandals. The scene simply screams “waste”.
The place is perfect for artists – plenty of concrete canvas and not a lot of nosy neighbors around. Heck, some people smashed all those windows and I doubt they got into trouble…
Your photos give a good idea of the size of this place – nice writeup as well – so much for a fee market without a conscious.
Thanks, Robert! Doing research on the place afterwards was actually more exciting than the exploration itself. I was really happy to find out that there was a story to tell, though I felt bad for the employees involved!
What a tale! Thank you for doing the time on the research and sharing.
I kind of like the big empties sometimes, there is something a little haunting about being in a massive place that you know was once crowded and now your breathing can echo in it. It also makes finding the little details even more entertaining.
It is a little funny to me that you opened with, “Abandoned furniture stores are quite rare, I’ve actually never heard of one before. ” as the third or fourth location I’ve ever explored was an abandoned furniture store, albeit considerably smaller in size than this one. Funny how it was always interesting but not on the main list of places to visit. I never knew what a gem we really have, couches and all, now I’m compelled to back and look at it anew.
Yeah, I was really captivated by the story. Most of the research I did back in summer, the day after I explored the place. I spent half a vacation day in front of my dad’s computer to find out more.
I’ve never heard of any abandoned furniture stores in Japan, so I was thrilled to find that one when I was on vacation in Germany. It seems like they are more common in other countries… so you should definitely go back and take some more photos before it’s too late!
Like some future dystopia where everyone already owns a Malm bed frame and Billy bookcase and all IKEAs are abandoned. It is rather bland compared to some of your other visits; no abandoned knick knacks or debris laying about.
Hey Jennifer,
Yeah, basically a concrete skeleton with a couple of small finds here – variety is the spice of life, and sometimes I really enjoy places like that. For example the *Nakagusuku Hotel* in Okinawa.
Next week’s article should be more to your taste then! 🙂
Remarkable photo and written documentation. Thanks for the glimpse.
Thanks a lot for your kind words!
We have an abandoned furniture store in my town. I believe it’s been abandoned for over twenty years. Love the photos and the graffiti.
Hey Elisabeth,
Did you ever explore that furniture store? Or is it completely locked?
Makes me wonder if there even are abandoned furniture stores in Japan…
I was in it many years ago before new owners locked it up and now use it for storage. I found it an interesting building mainly because it’s so old. No beautiful architecture, purely utilitarian, but interesting none the less.
Well, at least they are making good use of it now, though it’s a loss for urban explorers…
Guess what:
I grew up only 200m away from Möbel Erbe. My parents still live in our house nearby, I’m at least still living in Hanau(-Steinheim).
For me the Story of this ruin is like personally sad, as I remember this store underneath the once impressive cupola roof of glass as a magical place of my childhood.
You can’t imagine how beautiful (and different from every other furniture store I’ve ever seen since then) it looked inside. I often stood there stunning and wanting to take a ride on the glass-elevators so badly!
I even learned riding the bike on Möbel Erbe’s parking-lot – on sundays, when there was no traffic. When I was about 12 years old (in the year 2003) my best friend and I still enjoyed riding our bikes through the new built basement Garage of “Euro”. We once had a legendary little accident down there, when our bikes collided – it’s still making us laugh our asses off. 😀
I’m grateful, somebody who did not know this place in ist blooming time is now like cherishing the ruin. 🙂
Oh yeah, I can remember! Indeed, the best of the store were the elevators!
It is always so great when you add new pictures to already interesting stories. It’s almost like watching a film as things get even more fascinating.
It’s income tax time here in the US, so if I were in the German tax service, I’d wonder which person in the purchasing conglomerate controls the bookkeeping and accounting? Hello, forensic audit time! I’m not an accountant, tax lawyer or anything like that – it just sounds so fishy to me.