50 Years IBZ Gimborn

y mutual agreement of the working contracts of the kitchen staff was
eased, luckily enough, by the fact that the ladies, some of whom had
been on the team from the start, had reached an age that did not make
leaving Gimborn and the interpersonal contacts this entailed excessively
hard. However, the decision to give up kitchen operations was far from
being an uncontroversial one, particularly among veteran seminar
participants and Members of the Association. For them, the potential
advantages of costs, quality, and service went hand in hand with the risk
that the proverbial Gimborn atmosphere of personal attention would
suffer permanently.
1990s
The Old Steward’s Estate House
In the 1990s the business structures of educational institutions also
came into the spotlight. Notions like outsourcing, contracting out, etc.,
stood for thoughts of separating core activities theoretically from
sometimes cost-intensive subordinate matter and subjecting such
activities to assessment. For the IBZ, the operation of the kitchen was up
for review. It is true that a certain degree of irony lay in the fact that the
original plan, upon foundation in 1969, had already provided precisely
for separation, and that this had also been practiced in co-operation with
the management of the Schlosshotel at the time. It was only when that
joint effort collapsed after just 4 years that in-house kitchen operations
were set up from scratch, as it were, including the necessary construction
measures. Over 20 years later that decision was reversed and a meals
contract entered into with Mr and Mrs Preuß which comprised a move, so
to speak, of the former dining room to the Schlosshotel. The termination
The stable building in the foreground
For the persons in charge of the IBZ, such a solution was appealing also
because it would cure a space issue that had been almost impossible
to resolve previously. The so-called Great Room on the first floor of the