Drottningholm Palace
— — a baroque facade the lake keeps copying.
Not only on a wall.
“A Baroque palace on the island of Lovön, set close enough to Lake Mälaren that the long avenue and the water answer each other. The Swedish royal family lives in the south wing; the rest is open to visitors. The Court Theatre from 1766 still uses its original wooden stage machinery. Sweden's first UNESCO site, listed in 1991.
Drottningholm 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.
Drottningholm Palace stands on the island of Lovön in Lake Mälaren, about ten kilometres west of central Stockholm in Ekerö municipality. Nicodemus Tessin the Elder began the present Baroque building in 1662 for Queen Hedvig Eleonora; his son Nicodemus Tessin the Younger finished the principal interiors. UNESCO added the palace, its formal gardens, the Court Theatre, and the Chinese Pavilion to the World Heritage list in 1991, the first Swedish entry. King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia have used the south wing as their private residence since 1981, while the rest of the estate is open to the public.
The facade is yellow render over brick with sandstone detailing, modeled on the French Baroque vocabulary that Tessin the Elder had absorbed during travels in Italy and France in the 1650s. The garden front faces a formal parterre laid out from 1681, with bronze sculptures by Adriaen de Vries taken from Prague as war spoils in 1648. Behind the parterre, an English-style landscape garden begun in the 1780s under Gustav III opens out to the woods. The Chinese Pavilion, a rococo summer retreat completed in 1769, sits at the far end of the park.
The Drottningholm Court Theatre was built in 1766 under Queen Lovisa Ulrika and reopened by Gustav III in 1791. It is one of the very few 18th-century theatres in the world that still uses its original wooden stage machinery, including the hand-cranked wave and cloud devices. After Gustav III's assassination in 1792 the theatre fell out of use and was effectively sealed; the curator Agne Beijer rediscovered the working interior in 1921. The summer opera season today still performs Baroque and Classical works on the original stage.