Herford

Herford was ruled by women for a thousand years. The imperial abbey founded here in the ninth century was a free secular foundation of noblewomen whose princess-abbesses answered to emperor and pope alone, holding seat and vote among the princes of the realm; around their church — the vast early-Gothic hall of the Münster — grew the Hanseatic town of merchants and linen weavers, its Radewig quarter, gabled burgher houses and the Marienkirche on the abbesses' hill still mapping the old double sovereignty of cloister and commerce.

The town's modern signature is spectacularly other: MARTa Herford, the museum for contemporary art, design and architecture that Frank Gehry built in 2005 — brick waves and steel billows folding around white galleries, one of the master's few German buildings, landed like a benevolent apparition in a Westphalian mid-town. Its exhibitions keep the provocation productive, and the contrast with the Münster across town is itself a lesson in patronage, medieval and municipal.

The economic ground is domestic in the literal sense: Herford sits at the heart of East Westphalia's kitchen and furniture industry, which fits out households across Europe — design as daily bread, which makes Gehry's presence less surprise than statement. Add the timber-framed lanes, the Hoberge hills for walking, and Widukind's legendary shadow over the region's Saxon past: Herford compounds abbesses, cabinetmakers and computed curves into one confident Westphalian sentence.