Celebrity Real Estate: Adolf Hitler at Home; How Interior Design and Media Fluff Helped Sell a Dictatorship

Adolf Hitler was a country gentleman who lived in a mountain retreat in Obersalzberg, Bavaria, near the Austrian border. A 1939 article, noting the "atmosphere of quiet cheerfulness'' exuded by his estate, was released right before the beginning of WWII. It was one of many reports from the era that examined the private life of Germany's most reviled dictator.

According to the report of Curbed, Stratigakos's forthcoming book, Hitler at Home (Yale University Press), chronicles how architecture and interior design played a key role in the Nazi propaganda machine. Expensive renovations at Hitler's three main residences - the chancellery in Berlin, his Munich apartment, and his mountain home in the Alps - were used to portray him as modest, not machinating.

Years of research by Stratigakos revealed that Troost and others in the Nazi party had carefully crafted Hitler's domestic image. By 1934, the German Press Association reported that images of Hitler at home playing with his dogs were the most popular photos of him purchased by the media, both at home and abroad.

By the mid-1930s, Hitler's mountain home was one of the more recognizable in the World. "They used his domestic life to change his image, and the propaganda went hand-in-hand, and happened at the same time, they remodeled his domestic space," Stratigakos says. According to Stratigakos, journalists who cover Hitler's homes often wrote about how surprised they were to find a dictator's home was well-done but not extravagant.

The new book Hitler at Home projects Hitler as a likeable man. Hitler and his inner circle spent enormous amounts renovating his three homes to give them middle-class tastes, says author Despina Stratigakos. 'By the end of the 1930s, news stories around the world described him as a caring, gentle individual with great taste in home décor,' she said.

Daily Mail said Architectural historian Despina Stratigakos explores how the Fuhrer carefully curated Hitler's private light to project an image as a 'charming neighbor' in her new book, Hitler at Home.