Asam Church & Co.

Here is the store in Munich next to the Asam Church where you can buy the clunky jewelry. The more oppulent facade in the middle of the pictures is the Asam Church itself, to the left of it you can see yellow awnings, that is the store. Today when I googled the church I found out that the store is in the Asam building. Apparently the Asam brothers lived here. That is why it used to be called "Asamhaus".

In case you were wondering, this (above) is what the church itself looks like from the inside. It was completely destroyed by bombs in 1944 and restored - "lovingly restored", as it is referred to in Bavarian guide books - from 1975 to 1983 (actually it is being restored again right now and won't reopen until late September, 2009, just in time for Munich's Oktoberfest). It's a tiny church, 160 square meters, and one of the many things it is famous for is the "Sensenmann", an allegorical personification of death in the form of a golden skeleton, dangling in one of the corners, if I remember correctly. Spooked the heck out of me when I saw it for the first time.

And, since this blog is called jewelry and not churches, I added an example of the kind of jewelry the two gals make who reside in the Asamhaus; the coloring of the stones reminds of the facade of the church which itself is sort of reminiscent of the Bavarian Alps, a chalky grey.