Germany Guide
Berlin
Schloss Charlottenburg
Website: www.spsg.de
Address: Bus #M45 from Bahnhof Zoo
Opening time: Old Palace: Tues– Fri 9am–5pm, Sat & Sun 10am–5pm, last tour 4pm; New Wing: Tues– Fri 10am–6pm, Sat & Sun 11am–6pm
Price: Old Palace: tour of lower-floor royal apartments and upper floors €8, upper floors only €2; New Wing: €5 including audio guide
After the unrelieved modernity of most of Charlottenburg, the Baroque curves of Schloss Charlottenburg come as a surprise. You could happily spend a whole day wandering the Schloss and its gardens. Commissioned as a country house by the future Queen Sophie Charlotte in 1695, the Schloss expanded throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to provide a summer residence for Prussian kings, with master builder Schinkel providing the final touches. Unsurprisingly much of the Schloss was levelled in the war, so many of the reconstructed buildings are now far too perfect for their supposed age. The various parts of the Schloss can be visited and paid for separately, but combined day-tickets are the best value (€7); these give access to all Schloss buildings, but not the tour of the royal apartments in the Altes Schloss, nor the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte.
The upper floors of the Altes Schloss (Old Palace), the main building, can be visited without joining a tour and include the apartment of Friedrich Wilhelm IV and a collection of silver and tableware. To view the lower floor, with its sumptuous Baroque chambers and bedrooms of Friedrich I and Sophie Charlotte and ancestral portrait gallery, you're obliged to go on a German-only tour – free English pamphlets are offered. The Knobelsdorff-designed Neuer Flügel (New Wing) includes an elegant Golden Gallery and adjacent White Hall, whose eighteenth-century ceiling was replaced at the end of the nineteenth century by a marble-and-gold confection with full electric illumination. Next door, the Concert Room contains a superb collection of works by Watteau.
Laid out in the French style in 1697, the bucolic Schloss Gardens were transformed into an English-style landscaped park in the early nineteenth century; after severe war damage, they were mostly restored to their Baroque form. Just east of the Schloss and at the edge of the gardens proper, the Neuer Pavillon was designed by Schinkel for Friedrich Wilhelm III; the king preferred to live here, away from the excesses of the main building. Square and simple, it houses some of Schinkel's drawings and plans.