Augustusburg and Falkenlust Palaces
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How it came to be
In 1725 Clemens August of Bavaria, Archbishop and Elector of Cologne, began a new residence at Brühl on the foundations of a medieval castle. Johann Conrad Schlaun drew the first designs, and from 1727 François de Cuvilliés reworked the building into a Rococo palace. The grand staircase, designed by Balthasar Neumann, is made of marble, jasper and stucco, with a ceiling fresco by Carlo Carlone.
In 1729 work began on Falkenlust, a hunting lodge designed by Cuvilliés where the elector could practise falconry. Its two-storey main house is flanked by single-storey buildings that once housed his falcons. South of the palace Dominique Girard laid out a parterre with four fountains and a mirror pool, flanked by alleys of lime trees, and a path runs diagonally south from it to Falkenlust.
Peter Joseph Lenné turned the southern parterre into a landscape garden in the 19th century, but restoration to the plan of 1750 began in 1933. From shortly after the Second World War until 1994, Augustusburg, close to the then capital Bonn, served the German President for receptions of state guests. The two houses and their gardens, the first major Rococo creations in Germany, were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1984.
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