The unique colour palettes of the world’s most popular royal palaces have been revealed in a stunning new set of images, and Romania’s Peleș Castle ranks in the top twenty.
The images are part of a guide that also reveals the top 50 most popular royal palaces in the world.
Made for anyone who’d like to create a royal inspired interior in their home this summer, designers at the renovation and building design specialist, Roofing Megastore, identified 10 key colours and shades from each palace’s interior to create the royal colour palette series.
The study revealed that Buckingham Palace is the world’s most popular royal palace with Windsor Palace and Kensington Palace in second and third place, while Peleș Castle in Romania ranked in eighteenth position with a Palace Popularity Score of 385,826.
Other palaces in the top 10 include the Palace of Versailles in France, Mysore Palace in India and Prague Castle in the Czech Republic.
Peleș Castle is a Neo-Renaissance castle in the Carpathian Mountains, near Sinaia, in Prahova County, Romania, on an existing medieval route linking Transylvania and Wallachia, built between 1873 and 1914. Its inauguration was held in 1883. It was constructed for King Carol I.
The complex is composed of three monuments: Peleș Castle, Pelișor Castle, and the Foișor Hunting Lodge, according to Wikipedia.org.
Artists like George Enescu, Sarah Bernhardt, Jacques Thibaud and Vasile Alecsandri visited often as guests of Queen Elizabeth of Romania (herself a writer also known under the pen name of Carmen Sylva). In more recent times, many foreign dignitaries such as Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Muammar al-Gaddafi, and Yasser Arafat were welcomed at the castle.
By form and function, Peleș is a palace, but is largely called a castle. Its architectural style is a romantically inspired blend Neo-Renaissance and Gothic Revival similar to Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. A Saxon nfluence can be observed in the interior courtyard facades, which have allegorical hand-painted murals similar to those seen in northern European alpine architecture. Interior decoration is mostly Baroque influenced, with heavy carved woods and exquisite fabrics.
Peleș Castle has a 3,200-square-metre (34,000 sq ft) floor plan with over 170 rooms, many with dedicated themes from world cultures, with themes varing by function (offices, libraries, armouries, art galleries) or by style (Florentine, Turkish, Moorish, French, Imperial); all the rooms are lavishly furnished and decorated to the slightest detail. There are 30 bathrooms. The collection of arms and armour has over 4,000 pieces, divided between Eastern and Western war pieces and ceremonial or hunting pieces, spreading over four centuries of history. The hand-painted stained glass vitralios, which are mostly Swiss.
A personal property of the Royal Family from the beginning, Peleș Castle was nationalized after King Michael abdicated and left the country following an agreement with the government dominated by communists in 1947. In 1997 the castle was returned to the Royal Family after a long judicial case that has been finalised in 2007. However, the former king expressed his desire that the castle should continue to shelter the Peleș National Museum, as well as being occasionally used for public ceremonies organised by the Royal Family.