Cultural Patterns and Characteristics of an Era:

Upper Inn Valley Farmhouse Parlour

Man and Environment

The dwelling, in the sense of an environ-ment formed by humans, is the place where a cultureof living was able to develop. Prerequisite was thecreation of the parlour as a separate room heatablewithout smoke within the house. This came about,probably first in the alpine region, with the help of therear- loading stove, which formed the basis for thesignificance of the parlour.

In Tyrol, which, like its neighbouring re-gions, had profited from the economic and culturalupturn of southern Germany after the Thirty Years'War, the parlour, with its panelled walls and ceilings aswell as its corresponding furniture, reached a highstage of development early on. Thanks to its essentiallyunchanged structure, with its diagonal arrangement oftable and stove, this living form was retained into thenineteenth century. It is no surprise, therefore, that thevarious types of sitting rooms as the embodiment ofrural comfort have been at the centre of ethnographicresearch and museum work from the outset.

The panelling of this sitting room from1700, which has been in the Austrian Museum of FolkLife and Folk Art since 1914, probably comes fromPettneu am Arlberg. It was there, according to entriesin the local church records, that the couple" lohannsLechleitner and Magdalena Prantaverin", who im-mortalized their names on the doorframe on April 11,1698, baptized their son Johannes Franciscus.

Upper Inn Valley ParlourProbably Pettneu, Tyrol, dated 1700