Specialist in historical buildings | Offenbach

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The Offenbach master painter and restorer Jürgen Jobmann is celebrating its 50th anniversary with his company.

Jürgen Jobmann has distributed several thick catalogs on the table in the rectory of the French Reformed Congregation. In it, the master painter and restorer in the trade documented his work on a wide variety of buildings in the Rhine-Main area – including the church building and the parsonage on Herrnstrasse. “That is one of the tasks as a restorer,” says the 49-year-old. For him, this includes getting old city maps in the city archive and researching which colors were actually used in the baroque building of 1717/1718.

During the renovation of the rectory in 2017, Jobmann found out that the building had sunk by applying an elastic plastic paint in combination with old damage to the half-timbered house. “Unfortunately, we are the specialist for renovating renovators,” says Jobmann. A great deal was done wrong between the 1960s and 1980s and the early 1990s. The rectory is now safe again.

Jürgen Jobmann was born in his profession. Father Hermann founded his painting business in Offenbach as early as 1970 and Filius was to take over the business in 1997. This year it is celebrating its 50th anniversary. “Actually, that was never an option for me,” says Jobmann. At the age of 16 he had started an apprenticeship at a company in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen. Among other things, he worked in the Römer and the half-timbered house in Schellgasse 8, where his passion for restoration was awakened. “After I had my journeyman’s certificate, my father said to me: Now you’re starting to learn,” recalls Jobmann with a smile. He learned how to work with high-quality wallpapers and how to assemble stucco in his father’s company.

Working together and sitting together in the same household did not go well for long. After two years, Jobmann joined the Jürgen Hembus company, which was actually not looking for any employees: “I said: First you give me an hourly wage of 17.50 marks and I’ll let you increase my wages,” says Jobmann. But he really wanted to work on the big projects, “in which small craft businesses have no place either”.

Only after serving in the German Armed Forces and after Jobmann passed his master craftsman’s examination at the Badische Malerfachschule in Lahr and trained as a restorer in the trade in Fulda in 1997, did he take over his father’s business at the age of 26. He has mainly specialized in historical buildings. The Philippsruhe Castle, one of the most important cultural and architectural monuments in Hesse, the goldsmith’s house in Hanau or the gardener’s house of the former Villa Löwenruhe in Offenbach are among Jobmann’s references.

He has been the headmaster since 2011

The most beautiful building he was allowed to work on for a short time was the cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church in Nice. “I stood at the burial chapel for two days with a scalpel in my hand and was blissful,” says Jobmann. With two other craftsmen from Germany, he had already planned how he would work on the building for six months. The contract was then given to a Bulgarian company that was cheaper.

Jürgen Jobmann cannot complain about a lack of work. Since 2011 he has been head master of the Rhein-Main painters and varnishers’ guild and at the same time apprentice supervisor on the examination board. The building at Frankfurter Strasse 131, which was renovated by Jobmann in accordance with its listed building standards, recently received the city of Offenbach’s monument protection award.

“What I am missing is that the monument preservation department pays more attention to the documentation,” says Jobmann. The Rhein-Main painters and varnishers’ guild recently published a catalog on the subject of painting on half-timbered timber. “We try to hold onto knowledge. Unfortunately, the generations before us didn’t do that, ”says Jobmann.

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