The porcelain walls
Hundreds of Chinese, Japanese and Meissen pieces set into the walls themselves.
BuzzWoof — Public domain · Georgiana Ilea — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Gerd Eichmann — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Gerd Eichmann — CC BY-SA 4.0
The builder's husband, Ludwig Wilhelm von Baden, the empire's most famous commander in its late-seventeenth-century wars with the Ottomans — hence the epithet. Those wars' spoils and the era's 'Turkish' taste run through Baden's palaces, a historical layer an Arab visitor reads with open eyes.
The margraviate's pair: Rastatt is vast, formal, Versailles-manner; Favorite small, personal, unrepeatable in content. Time for one: Favorite is the less repeatable. The thorough combine both in a day, ten minutes apart.
The tour is fragility and no-touching — right for calm children from about ten. For younger: the free park with lake and trees is an excellent playground while parents take turns touring.
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Fifteen minutes north of Baden-Baden stands Europe's most complete surviving "porcelain palace": Favorite, the summer residence built by Margravine Sibylla Augusta in the early eighteenth century and preserved by miracle as she furnished it — never modernised, never looted, never burned. The interior dazzles by strangeness: walls set with hundreds of Chinese, Japanese and Meissen porcelain pieces, mosaic floors, glittering mirror cabinets, and the original show kitchen with its ranks of copper. The formidable margravine — widow of "Türkenlouis", commander of the Ottoman wars — gathered her era's whole taste into one house, with an odd austerity beneath: a hermitage she built in the garden for her penances. Entry is by guided tour only, protecting the fragility; the English park around is free for strolling. An elegant half-day trip from Baden-Baden by car or bus.
Hundreds of Chinese, Japanese and Meissen pieces set into the walls themselves.
Original copper in ranks, in a kitchen for display not cooking — the age's oddity.
Glittering chambers in the taste of Eastern and Western courts at once.
An austerity hut in the garden, built by the mistress of splendour — one woman's two faces.
Am Schloss Favorite 5, 76437 Rastatt