Step outside on a Tuesday morning and the only sounds are the chickens from the farm two fields over and the wind moving through the fruit trees at the edge of your pond. No traffic. No neighbors pressed up against your fence line. Just 12,069 square meters of Lower Saxony countryside doing exactly what it's supposed to do—making you exhale. That's what life at Schapener Straße 40 actually feels like.
This is a rare find, and not in the vague way that phrase gets thrown around. A 300 m² main residence with seven bedrooms, a fully self-contained guesthouse, a horse walker, a converted workshop, a pond, mature fruit trees, and an energy label A rating—all on over 1.2 hectares in the Emsland district of northwestern Germany. Properties like this don't come up often. When they do, they tend to go quickly.
The house itself was built in 1930, which gives it the kind of solid bones you can't manufacture—thick walls, generous ceiling heights, a sense of permanence. A full renovation in 1996 brought it firmly into the modern era, and the current owners have kept the upgrades coming. The kitchen was completely redone in 2022 with built-in appliances and a layout that actually works for feeding a crowd. In 2025, 42 solar panels and a hybrid heat pump were installed alongside a 300-liter hybrid boiler, pushing the property's energy consumption to just 49.9 kWh per square meter per year. For a house this size, that's a genuinely impressive number.
The ground floor layout makes sense from the moment you walk in. The entrance hall opens to a living room with French doors that push out onto a covered veranda—a spot that earns its keep in every season, whether you're drinking coffee and watching frost settle on the meadow in January o ... click here to read more
