Charlottenhof Palace

The Palace of Charlottenhof, or Schloss Charlottenhof as it is officially known, was the summer residence of Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia. The artistically-minded prince himself called his idyllic estate “Siam”, the old name for Thailand, which literally means “The Land of the Free”. His father had bought the land bordering on the south of Sanssouci Park in 1825 and given it to him as a present. It already had a Baroque manor on it, which the Crown Prince promptly remodelled to suit his own tastes. The gardens too were completely redesigned. To this end Frederick William engaged some of the best artists and craftsmen of the time: the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the landscape gardener Peter Joseph Lenné. The two of them combined their skills to produce a harmonious synthesis of the arts. It is with good reason that the Palace of Charlottenhof and its grounds are known as a “Prussian Arcadia”...