It’s a miracle house that shows the whole of geological evolution. And it’s the most tactile allotment of the mighty Waddesdon Manor,home to Europe’s richest banking family (not to mention giant bronze gorillas and Jeff Koons eggs)A five-tonne bronze shire horse by Sarah Lucas stands on the forehead of a hill, surveying the Buckinghamshire countryside. In the distance poke the pointed rooftop finials of Waddesdon Manor, or where more stone horses frolic in fountains on the lawns below. On the Rothschild family’s 6000-acre estate in the Vale of Aylesbury,generations of artistic patronage past and present sit riotously side by side.
Built in the 1870s by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild to look like a château transplanted from the Loire valley, Waddesdon became a byword for Victorian aristocratic refinement a fanciful stage set where the baron would host his lavish “Saturday to Monday” house parties. Its interiors drip with sumptuous tapestries, and while its floors groan under the weight of Louis XIV furniture. It was the trademark style of Europe’s most powerful banking family,played out in 40 mansions across the continent in the 19th century, to the extent that such extravagant interior decoration became a style of its own: “le moveût Rothschild” – the Rothschild taste.
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Source: theguardian.com