him with younger, progressive architects for some of the interiors on the , but he was still responsible for her main public rooms. When Albert Ballin commissioned the first express liner for the rival Hamburg America Line, the Augusta Victoria, he hired Poppe to design the interior. The new headquarters building he designed for NDL (1901–1910) was at the time the largest building in Bremen. Poppe's historicism was not favoured by younger architects, who worked in Jugendstil and reformist styles. At the end of his life he withdrew to his estate of Poppenhof on the right bank of the River Lesum in Burglesum, now part of Bremen, where he died in 1915. He is buried in the Riensberg Cemetery in Bremen. Style Poppe's designs drew most on the Renaissance and the Baroque; in the first part of his career he was greatly influenced by what he had seen in Italy and especially France. In the 1870s he began to build more in the style of the English Gothic revival. His buildings were richly ornamented inside and out; as his career progressed, he increasingly worked with large interior decorating firms, especially Bembé of Mainz, who executed his ship interiors. The result was popular with his wealthy clients; at the turn of the century, he was Bremen's most prominent architect; but after fashions changed, was outmoded. Kreyenhorst Castle was demolished in the 1920s. His ship interiors have been described as "overblown, over-decorated, and dark", as "a seagoing baroque collage of high ceilings, massive pillars, gilded balustrades, trumpeting cherubs, and gigantic statuary," as "temples of high baroque, grand galleries of an aspiration so Valkeyrian that only megalomaniacs might dally there in comfort or good conscience", by Cunard executives who visited the and in 1903 as "bizarre, extravagant and crude, loud in colour and restless in form, obviously costly, and showy to the most extreme degree" and by a contemporary American as "'two of everything but the kitchen range', then gilded." The architecture critic Walter Müller-Wulckow described the Bremen Cotton Exchange, which started to shed its profuse ornamentation after exposure to the elements, as the "crassest" manifestation of "cancerous" building styles. Selected works Public buildings Bremen Waterworks (1871–73), with Dietrich Berg as technical designer, Poppe designed Bremen's first municipal waterworks, housing it in a square red-brick Gothic revival tower with four corner turrets which emulated the form of the Grand Master's Residence in the