First established in 1745 by Frederick the Great, the Park of Sanssouci or ‘without-care’ at Potsdam was developed as the summer retreat of the Hohenzollern Kings of Prussia — and later German Emperors — from their nearby capital of Berlin. Among the numerous palaces, follies and garden buildings that came to ornament this expansive landscape is a small, but important neo-Classical villa called Schloss Charlottenhof.
Built between 1826 and 1829 by the Greek Revival architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, it was described by the celebrated landscape architect who collaborated on the design of its gardens, Peter Joseph Lenné, as ‘a fantastic creation, with the magic of a strange, dreamed, longed-for world’.
In 1819, the Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, later Friedrich Wilhelm IV, met and fell in love with Elisabeth of Bavaria. The two shared an interest in the Arts, but their different religious confessions — he was Lutheran and she Catholic — delayed their marriage until 1823. During this period, he began to sketch designs for a magnificent family home in Potsdam in the form of a vast multi-storied Roman palace named ‘Belriguardo’, complete with viaduct, temple and a triumphal arch.
Fig 2: A view of Schloss Charlottenhof across the fountain pool. A formal garden runs along the berm of earth to the left.
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, however, the Prussian treasury was depleted and the Crown Prince was persuaded towards a project of more modest proportions. As a gift, in 1825, Friedrich Wilhelm III presented his son with a farmland and house named ‘Charlottenhof’, which adjoined the south section of the royal park.
The Crown Prince immediately set to work with Schinkel to design his own perfect summer villa on the site of the farmstead. Schinkel was by 1825 well established as an architect. His buildings were prominent across Berlin and he was already involved in the park of Sanssouci itself, where he was at work on another residence at Schloss Glienicke for Prince Carl of Prussia.
In his work to the Charlottenhof, Schinkel was particularly inspired by the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus on the south face of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. He was, however, also forced into a close collaboration with his patron, who was fascinated with architectural design. For the Crown Prince, building his very own palace was not simply a playful expression of intellect, but a symbolic gesture of idyllic world-building. He yearned for a perfect haven to offer both himself and his young bride a bucolic retreat from the rigours of court and began to refer to the Charlottenhof as his ‘Siam’ or Arcadia.
Fig 3: The front hall. The doors and the statue niches are furnished with brilliant-crimson baize secured with gold-headed pins.
The Crown Prince’s vision for ‘Siam’ was, in fact, Italy, specifically the palatial villas of Laurentinum, located by Ostia, and Tusca in Tuscany, described by Pliny the Younger, the patrician magistrate of ancient Rome. Crucially, his knowledge of Italy and Italian architecture was as yet entirely theoretical and book-learnt, owing to the fact that his father refused him permission to travel to Rome until 1828.
It is important to note that Charlottenhof was never intended by Wilhelm to function as a residence. With their formal apartments located in Sanssouci, just over a mile away in the royal park, the couple only ever enjoyed Charlottenhof for day trips to host picnics, teas or small dinner parties. It did have bedrooms, including one for the royal pair located between their respective studies, but these were wholly decorative (Fig 8).
Fig 4: Stained glass casts a blue shadow over the entrance hall. In the centre is an exquisitely modelled bronze fountain. The low doorway leads to the service areas.
As well as working on the villa, the Prince, Schinkel and Lenné — who was well acquainted with English theory, as evidenced in his General Remarks on British Parks and Gardens (1824) — designed an extensive complex of interconnecting gardens and subsidiary buildings. These included a Roman baths, a teahouse and the gardener’s house, a well-proportioned Italianate villa for the head gardener and his apprentices.
To a remarkable degree, the Charlottenhof cannibalises the fabric of the late-18th-century farmhouse it replaces. There are no images of this building, but it is presumed to have been built in the traditional Prussian style of the time; a low building, double-fronted and likely 8–10 windows across, with steps leading to an elevated front door. Schinkel altered the roof and added a semi-circular bay window to the bedroom of the Crown Prince and Princess. He also swallowed the original entrance stair within a new front hall and raised up a garden terrace to the rear of the building (Fig 2).
Fig 5: The front door is detailed after the Monument of Thrasyllus. The mullions and transom form a cross, a reference to the building’s underlying Early Christian plan.
It has been convincingly argued by Dr Samuel Wittwer that the design of the villa reflects two of the Crown Prince’s great interests, Antiquity and the Early Christian Church. The overall plan of the building and its terrace, for example, echoes that of a basilica, complete with atrium, narthex, aisles, nave and apse, whereas the front door incorporates a mullion and transom in the shape of a cross — its detailing borrowed from the Monument of Thrasyllus — within a Greek doorcase (Fig 5).
Beyond the sliding front doors is a marble entrance hall with a double staircase (Fig 4). In the embrace of the stairs at ground level is a massive bronze fountain designed by Schinkel and a low servants’ doorway to the service rooms in the basement of the building. The fountain in place today was actually installed in the 1860s and replaces a much simpler predecessor. The light in this particular section of the palace is striking for its cool, blue hue, emanating from the stained-glass windows inset with six-point stars above the door, also by Schinkel. The design is possibly a borrowing from Italian medieval precedent, such as the vault decoration of Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.
Fig 6: One of the beds in the Tent Room.
This space, which feels like an antechamber of an ancient temple, introduces a series of much more comfortable rooms above. These are homely and informal, rather than palatial. Their furnishings include, for example, Italian trattoria-style chairs in the small antechamber to the Crown Prince’s study (albeit made of prized chestnut), as well as a needlework sofa embroidered by the Princess herself. It’s possible to visualise the family gathered around the central, circular table of the Blue Drawing Room for a game of cards.
Perhaps the most striking interior design in the Charlottenhof, however, is the Tent Room (Fig 6). This is ostensibly a guest bedroom in the form of a Roman campaign tent with striped-blue wallpaper and russet trimmings. There are matching linen curtains, bed canopies and pitched ceiling coverings stretched on frames. It’s one in a group of such interiors in palaces across Europe that seem to have been popularised by the Napoleonic wars. Lady Castlereagh, for example, was pictured in such a room during the Congress of Vienna in 1815 for a portrait that now hangs at Mount Stewart, Co Down, Northern Ireland.
The specific source of this example at the Charlottenhof is said to be the Salle de Conseil, one of several tent-like interiors created at Malmaison on the outskirts of Paris (Country Life, June 24, 2015). This house was used by Napoleon when he was enjoying the office of First Consul and subsequently became one of his favoured retreats. It was largely the creation of his first wife, the Empress Joséphine, however, who died there in 1814. She had two children, Hortense and Eugène de Beauharnais. Eugène went on to marry Augusta Amalia of Bavaria, who was a half-sister of Elisabeth Ludovika, the wife of the Crown Prince Wilhelm Friedrich.
Fig 7: The Crown Princess’s study, decorated with copies of dancers from Pompeii.
Augusta Amalia proceeded to decorate a tent room in her own house and, as both sisters remained so close throughout their lives, it is believed that Ludovika emulated her sister’s design in this room in the Charlottenhof. Here she incorporated the traditional Bavarian colours of light blue and white, colours that are also used on the external shutters of the villa. Interestingly, this tented-room design was also incorporated by Hortense de Beauharnais in her own home, Schloss Arenenberg, on the shores of Lake Constance.
Another theme of the interior is the art of the Italian Renaissance, in particular the green anteroom hung with an assortment of print reproductions of works by Raphael, da Vinci and Michelangelo. These hangings are original to Schinkel and the Crown Prince’s design for the villa. Most notable here is the inclusion of various print reproductions of Raphael’s Cartoons, which were full-scale designs for a tapestry commissioned in 1515 by Pope Leo X for the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel and depict the lives of the apostles St Peter and St Paul. The print reproductions in the Charlottenhof number various Biblical vignettes, including the Healing of the Lame Man, the Miraculous Draught of Fishes and Paul Preaching at Athens. Raphael’s original cartoon is now housed in the V&A Museum in London, where it has been on loan from the Royal Collection since 1865. Its public display was initiated by Queen Victoria, who advocated for the cartoons to be made accessible to a wider audience. Although it is unclear whether the Charlottenhof was ever visited by Prince Albert, the print collection in this antechamber certainly recalls the Nazarene taste that so fascinated him.
Throughout the interiors, Schinkel weaves in colour schemes and furniture inspired by Antiquity. The pink and teal colour scheme in the study of the Crown Princess (Fig 7), for example, is borrowed from Pompeii and can be paralleled in the earlier Music Room at Harewood House, West Yorkshire, by Robert Adam. It’s possible that the silvering the door and cornice details is a borrowing from German Baroque design. Within the cornice are copies of a Pompeian frieze depicting Bacchic dancers and the room also includes a Roman day-bed.
Even more striking as an evocation of Pliny’s Arcadian villas, however, is the furnishing of the central hall overlooking the terrace of the Charlottenhof. Here, Schinkel’s tables and chairs are modelled on Roman originals and the walls hung with original 1776 prints by Giovanni Volpato — hand finished in water-colour — after Raphael’s celebrated Vatican loggias, thus evoking once more a neo-Classical dialogue between ancient form and Renaissance revival. The only visible betrayal of the late-18th-century farmhouse in this reimagined central hall can be seen in the corner alcoves of the room. As a farmhouse, these alcoves would have contained large porcelain stoves. Hung with brilliant scarlet cloth secured with golden clasps and with star-studded blue domes, the alcoves have been repurposed as sculpture niches (Fig 3).
Scarlet cloth is also used to face the doors of this room, which is flooded with light from the three floor-to-ceiling doors that open onto the terrace and into Lenné’s magnificent gardens. The Doric portico outside the central hall at the Charlottenhof exemplifies Schinkel’s masterful adoption of a neo-Pompeian idiom, inspired by excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii (Fig 1).
Fig 8: Nobody ever slept in the Charlottenhof, but this bedroom is furnished as if they did. Above is a copy of a Raphael Transfiguration.
Within the portico, a sequence of familial likenesses is artfully woven into the decorative scheme of the frescoed walls. Dominating the central west-facing wall is a finely modelled double portrait of Wilhelm and his consort, Elisabeth. These twin visages, executed in pronounced relief, lend a palpable dignity to the composition, their moulding reminiscent of Classical intaglios.
Beneath this principal image are a series of portraits depicting members of the extended royal family — a poignant substitution, perhaps, for the children the royal couple never had. Rendered in a manner that evokes the luminous sheen of enamel, these images, in fact, cunningly emulate Roman relief carvings in gemstone. Among them are likenesses of the Crown Prince’s siblings and their respective spouses. Particularly notable is his sister, Princess Charlotte, who, through marriage to Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, assumed the name Alexandra Feodorowna. Also depicted is the Crown Prince’s brother, Wilhelm I, future successor to the throne and grandfather to the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II.
Fig 9: 'Visiting the villa today, it’s still possible to enjoy the sanctuary they craved.'
Interspersed among these familial tableaux are vignettes of the royal household, including portraits of ladies-in-waiting to the Crown Princess and esteemed members of the court. Of especial interest is the inclusion of Alexander von Humboldt, naturalist and courtier, who had formerly served as equerry to the Prince. It was with Humboldt that the Crown Prince collaborated to inaugurate a civil division of the Order Pour le Mérite, an honour created to recognise enduring excellence in the realms of science and the Arts. This distinction, which is still awarded today, counts among its eminent recipients Charles Darwin, Giuseppe Verdi, Max Planck and Albert Einstein.
To the south wall of the portico, the painted pantheon extends further, featuring a portrait of Schinkel. He is joined by other trusted advisors to the Crown Prince, among them the adjutant Count Karl von Roeder and the sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch. Although each portrait in the portico is masterfully completed on an individual basis, viewed as a whole this gallery of key players in Wilhelm’s life underscores the fusion of dynastic identity with archaeological fantasy.
The concept of ‘Sehnsucht’ or intense yearning for some kind of distant, or indeed, unknown, ideal, was important to the German Romantic movement. It’s an idea that also seems central to the Charlottenhof, where the Crown Prince and his wife — both ardent Romantics — sought informality and the comforts of family life in an idyllic setting. Visiting the villa today, it’s still possible to enjoy the sanctuary they craved.
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This feature originally appeared in the January 28, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.