Holger Fromme's pater familias meanwhile didn't play the snake but granite pits with mines in South Africa and elsewhere. Upon selling off parts of this business to retire, the posh showcase building with every imaginable variant of polished stone applied to floors, staircases and sculptures stood empty. It found itself eventually leased to his son's enterprise, Avantgarde Acoustic. What the exterior images don't show is a ceiling glass pyramid that provides additional light to the majestic reception area. A pair of street-facing hornspeakers behind the ground-level windows come as a major surprise to unsuspecting tourists visiting this south-of-Darmstadt area for its picturesque valleys, woods and castles or burgs.
As we shall see, Fromme senior was an avid collector of Innuit and Aleuthian stone mason's art. Accordingly, and over the long period of what clearly was a prosperous business enterprise, he amassed an enviable arsenal of Eskimo sculptures which today turns the Avantgarde headquarters into a veritable Fine Arts gallery. The humongous Quartz crystal cluster stems from one of the family-owned mines and used to be sited outdoors the building as an eye catcher until vandals broke off pieces to mandate a relocation to indoors. Suffice to say that the gleaming floors, large glass surfaces, antique Persian rugs and indoors trees made quite the statement.