Helbling Haus

The Helbling Haus in Innsbruck wears a facade so heavily decorated with stone carvings it looks like it was iced by a pastry chef. Beneath those eighteenth-century stucco cherubs and floral garlands, the building is a standard Gothic house from the middle ages. In seventeen thirty, Johann Martin Gumpp the Younger covered the plain walls with this riot of Rococo detail. He transformed a sturdy merchant home into a display of pure, ornamental excess that hides the simple stone structure underneath.