Villa Tober, also known as the Theater an der Winkelwiese, is a protected building in Zürich-Hottingen that comprises the mansion built in 1853, and a public park.

One of the first landscape gardens in Zürich is an essential part of the mansion, with its typical winding paths and the surrounding walls.

In 1913 the Mertens brothers modernized the southern garden in the then new architectural style whose characteristic elements are straight ways, cut hedges and the rhythm between open, colored flower beds and shady, green areas.

The villa was subsequently used by the Theater an der Winkelwiese and by the acting academy, and several rooms were loaned to artists.

[1] In 1996 the Villa Tobler was leased by the city of Zürich in construction law to the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, the sponsorship of the Kunsthaus which bore the costs of the renovation.

[1] On 16 June 1964 Maria von Ostfelden, an actress and then the director, opened with Pinter's "Der Hausmeister" the theater as a venue for her directorial work.

During these years, the playhouse developed to a contemporary and socially critical aligned experimental theater with a thematically and artistically wide range of 20th-century plays, for example, works by Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Dario Fo and Alfred Jarry, and premieres and special events (guest performances, readings, jazz concerts).

In more than twenty years of its existence, the training, which is accompanied by practitioners and authors, has proven to be an efficient "processor" for contemporary playwrights at the beginning of their careers.