The white-painted, timber-balconied villa architecture that lines the seafronts of Binz, Sellin, Göhren, and Baabe is collectively called Bäderarchitektur — Baltic seaside-resort architecture. It dates mostly from the 1880s to the 1910s, when the Prussian middle class first started to take summer holidays at the coast.
Most of the buildings were either left to decay or stripped for materials during the East German period, and the restoration since 1990 has been one of the success stories of post-reunification Mecklenburg. The strict heritage regulations mean that the seafronts at Binz and Sellin today look more or less as they did before the First World War — turrets, finials, fretwork, the lot.
Strandpromenade in Binz and Wilhelmstraße in Sellin are the two best places to see the style at its most concentrated.