Medienhafen
Gehry's leaning towers, design lofts and the Rhine at the door.
Where to live in Düsseldorf's Medienhafen: its architecture, nightlife and flats — plus the Unterbilk streets next door where most residents actually live.
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Furnished apartments in Oberkassel
A handpicked selection of homes in and around Oberkassel.
Oberkassel
Grand façades, the Luegallee and the skyline across the water
There is a Düsseldorf you arrive at, and a Düsseldorf you cross a river to reach. Oberkassel is the second kind. Step off the Oberkasseler Brücke and the city changes register: the Altbier hum of the Altstadt fades behind you, the air comes off the water, and ahead lie wide, tree-lined streets where almost every façade was drawn by a different hand. This is the left bank — linksrheinisch — and Düsseldorfers say the word with a certain quiet pride.
Oberkassel owes its looks to good fortune and good planning. The urban grid was laid out around the turn of the last century to a master plan by Joseph Stübben, and the district then filled up, house by house, between 1900 and the First World War — the city's great boom years. Many of the artists who had shown at Düsseldorf's celebrated 1902 art exhibition settled here and built themselves handsome villas and apartment houses. Because the quarter came through the Second World War largely unscathed, those Jugendstil and Gründerzeit fronts survive almost intact: stucco, sculpted stone and wrought iron, each building given its own decorative — sometimes downright theatrical — character. Lovers of period architecture will feel instantly at home, and at HeyFlats the furnished apartments here run the full range, from opulently corniced Altbau to crisp contemporary flats behind those historic walls.
Architects gave each house its own face — individual, decorative, now bizarre, now picturesque, in stucco, stone and iron, somewhere between Jugendstil and free historicism.
And then there is the view that no other quarter in the city can sell you. Walk the few minutes to the Rhine meadows and the whole Altstadt skyline lines up across the water — the castle tower, the leaning spire of St. Lambertus, the Rheinturm beyond — best of all at sunset, when the lights come on and the river hands the picture back doubled. The streets with this Rhine view are, unsurprisingly, among the most expensive addresses in Düsseldorf. Each July the broad Oberkasseler Rheinwiesen host the Größte Kirmes am Rhein, the largest funfair on the river — a week of big wheels, fireworks and the whole city pouring across the bridge.
The skyline lines up across the water, and the river hands the picture back doubled.
Luegallee
Trams down the middle, boutiques and Oberkassel's food scene
The spine of the district is the Luegallee, running from Barbarossaplatz to Belsenplatz with the trams gliding straight down the middle and the district town hall sitting, very sensibly, right on it. This is where Oberkassel does its living: greengrocers and florists, a good baker, boutiques, and a food scene with serious range for a single street. Italy got here first and never left — the Trattoria Carissima has been a fixture for the best part of thirty-five years, with the next generation now at the pizza oven. But Oberkassel is also where you eat Japanese without crossing back to "Little Tokyo": Sabi & Gari turns out some of the best sushi on the left bank, and the queue outside Sakuragiya Ramen moves slowly for a reason. For heat, the Sichuan kitchen at Fu Sheng does the trick.
What makes the Luegallee more than a shopping street is the way the neighbourhood actually uses it. Oberkassel likes to call itself a village — das Dorf — and this is its main street: prams and dogs in the morning, coffee and the newspaper at the pavement tables, the same faces at the baker and the wine shop week after week. The plane trees turn it into a green tunnel in summer and a run of lights at Christmas. Walk it from end to end and the energy keeps gathering westward, until it spills out at Belsenplatz.
Oberkassel likes to call itself a village and the Luegallee is its main street.
Belsenplatz
Tram hub, brasserie square and gateway to BelsenPark
At the Luegallee's western end sits Belsenplatz, the busy heart of the left bank and the spot where you grasp how Oberkassel fits together. It has been a transport hub for more than a century, and today it's the district's main Rheinbahn interchange — the point from which trams fan out to the Altstadt, the Hauptbahnhof and beyond (locals grumble fondly about its sprawl of platforms). It's a proper square in its own right, too, anchored by the cult French Brasserie Hülsmann, which draws weekend queues from across the city, with newer café terraces spilling onto the pavement around it. And it marks the seam of the district: behind it, the grand old Oberkassel gives way to the new-build BelsenPark quarter.
Belsenplatz wears its railway past openly. The old station building still stands on the square, and the tangle of platforms is a leftover from the days when every tram and country train on the left bank converged here before splitting off toward Neuss, Krefeld and Moers. Behind it lay the goods yard — and when the freight trains stopped running in 1981, that land fell quiet for a generation. What eventually rose there is the quarter the square now opens onto: BelsenPark.
Behind the old station, the goods yard fell quiet in 1981 - and stayed quiet for a generation.
Belsenpark
The newest corner of the left bank
Not everything on the left bank is a hundred years old. On the site of the former Oberkassel goods station, a brand-new quarter has risen around the Belsenplatz transport node: BelsenPark, a boulevard of bright apartment ensembles with shops at street level. The architects took their cue from the Côte d'Azur of the 1950s — hence the building groups named Nizza and Cannes, with shell-limestone bases, pale brick fronts, white-rendered window surrounds and striped awnings that bring a flicker of southern France to the Rhine. For anyone who loves the look of Oberkassel but wants new-build comfort, lifts and underground parking, this is the obvious answer. It is also one of the best-connected spots in the whole borough — the tram is, quite literally, at the door.
It's a different rhythm from the old streets across Belsenplatz: open boulevards, ground-floor cafés and a supermarket, balconies looking onto landscaped courtyards rather than stucco façades. For a newcomer who'd rather unpack into something turn-key than restore a hundred-year-old flat, it's the easy choice — and HeyFlats lists furnished homes across the Nizza and Cannes ensembles.
Shell-limestone, pale brick and striped awnings — a flicker of the Riviera on the Rhine.
BelsenPark has filled quickly with the people the left bank tends to attract: young professionals, relocating families and downsizers who want lock-up-and-leave ease without giving up the neighbourhood. It is proof that the left bank isn't a museum piece — it still builds. And it sits only a few tram stops from the oldest, quietest stretch of all. Carry on north along the river and the noise drops away entirely: you reach Niederkassel.
The left bank's newest address is a few tram stops from its oldest.
Niederkassel
Quiet streets, riverside calm and the EKŌ-Haus garden
Just upstream, the mood softens again. The old heart of Niederkassel still feels like the village it once was, with snug traditional taverns and a slower pace, and yet some of its riverside streets are quietly among the priciest in town.
Its real surprise, though, is hidden behind a garden wall on Brüggener Weg: the EKŌ-Haus der japanischen Kultur. Düsseldorf is home to the largest Japanese community in Germany, and in 1993 the industrialist Yehan Numata gave the city this remarkable place — the only Jōdo-Shinshū Buddhist temple of its kind in Europe, modelled on a temple near Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo. Around it lies a meticulous dry garden, where rivers and waterfalls are "drawn" entirely in raked stone, and a traditional wooden house with a tea room. You can join a tea ceremony, take a course in ink painting, calligraphy or ikebana, or simply slip off your shoes and let the city's hurry drop away for an afternoon — admission is gentle on the wallet. It is, in the best sense, a short trip to Japan without leaving NRW.
For families relocating from Tokyo or Osaka, the left bank's clustering of Japanese life, schooling and culture makes Niederkassel a natural landing place, and HeyFlats keeps a steady selection of furnished homes within walking distance of the garden.
All the water in the garden — the stream, the pond, the waterfall — is laid out in stone.
Heerdt
Old village lanes, a working edge and the best value on the left bank
Every elegant district needs a sensible neighbour, and Heerdt is Oberkassel's. Behind the main roads, Alt-Heerdt hides a knot of old lanes and sturdy houses with real village charm; out toward the edges sit offices and businesses that give the quarter its working pulse. The result is the best value on the peninsula: you keep the left-bank postcode, the bridges and the tram lines, but pay rather less for the privilege. Heerdt is a district visibly on the up — exactly the moment to arrive, and HeyFlats has the furnished flats to prove it.
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