Linderhof Palace
— — the one palace the king lived to see finished.
Not only on a wall.
“The smallest of King Ludwig II's three Bavarian palaces, and the only one he saw completed. Linderhof sits in a narrow valley between Ettal and Oberammergau, ringed by spruce and limestone slopes. A formal water garden runs down from the south front; a gilded figure stands in the centre of the fountain basin, and the jet climbs about twenty-five metres on the half hour. The interiors are rococo revival, restrained for a fairy-tale king. The painting holds the white of the building against the green of the trees.
Linderhof Palace, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Schloss Linderhof is a royal villa in the Graswang valley near the village of Ettal, in the Bavarian Alps about 95 kilometres south-west of Munich. It is the smallest of the three palaces built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria — the others being Neuschwanstein and Herrenchiemsee — and the only one completed in his lifetime. Construction ran from 1870 to 1886. The palace and its grounds are administered by the Bavarian Palace Administration and remain one of the most visited royal sites in Germany, drawing roughly half a million visitors a year.
Linderhof is a small, square, two-storey building in white stuccoed limestone, designed in a rococo revival idiom by court architect Georg von Dollmann. Ludwig drew on Versailles for the model and on the Petit Trianon for the scale, but the interiors are denser: a Hall of Mirrors lined with gilt frames, a bedchamber dominated by a great blue canopy, a porcelain peacock that the king set out when he was in residence. The Venus Grotto in the gardens, a wave-machine-equipped artificial cave inspired by Wagner's Tannhäuser, was one of the earliest interiors lit by electric light.
The palace is open daily except major holidays; the main interiors are seen on a guided tour of roughly twenty-five minutes, and entry is timed. Summer hours typically run 9 am to 6 pm, winter hours close earlier. The garden fountain in front of the south façade plays every half hour from May into October, the jet climbing roughly 25 metres. The site sits about 950 metres above sea level and stays cool even in midsummer. Buses run from Oberammergau station; the nearest motorway exit is Oberau on the A95, then about 20 kilometres on country roads.