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Tullgarn: A charming lakeside summer-palace of the Swedish monarchy April 25, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Airlines, Beach Resorts, Hotels, Library, Lodges, Memorial, Museum, Russia, Sweden, Travellers Cheque , trackback

Much of Sweden is composed of very wild country, and even today one can travel for miles through the rock-strewn, dark pine forests only occasionally seeing a cluster of houses or a gang of wood-cutters or a school bus on its daily round, returning the children from the school-house in some local township. Every now and then one comes to a town which has grown up round the timber industry, but such towns are mostly fairly new and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was nothing but wilderness stretching over most of Sweden — dark, terrifying and, it is easy to imagine, filled with trolls and other supernatural beings. Separated by these vast forests, were the three principal areas of habitation. The most important was around Stockholm, and stretched some seventy miles inland to include the cathedral and university city of Uppsala, and the iron-mining towns to the north. The other two areas consisted of the hinterland of Göte-borg (Gothenburg), and the more hospitable southern part of the peninsula, which was mainly agricultural. With a few exceptions, Sweden’s country houses are found concentrated in these three areas. Those in the south are associated with great estates, while those around Goteborg were chiefly the retreats of the rich merchants and shipping-magnates of that city. Those in the Stockholm area, on the other hand, were the country seats and summer residences of the Swedish nobility, who needed to be within the reach of the Court and the capital.

Travel GuidebookMany of the country houses round Stockholm lie in the most idyllic surroundings, often on one of the many lakes which, in summer, are usually dead still, their waters only broken by the diving of a great-crested grebe or the rising of a fish. Others are situated on the shores of some inlet along the rocky coastline, looking out over the low, grey skerries to seaward. It is on such an inlet that Tullgarn lies, with the Baltic lapping the shore at the bottom of its garden. Strictly speaking, Tullgarn is not a great palace at all. It is, in fact, only a moderately large country house, but it has been the much-loved summer residence of several members of the Swedish Royal Family.

The present building was erected in the 1720’s by Magnus Julius de la Gardie, a member of a powerful Swedish family of Dutch descent. For this work he employed a Frenchman named Joseph-Gabriel Destain. Destain had served as a military engineer in the Swedish army, but when the war with Russia finally came to an end in 1720, he found himself out of a job and with a considerable amount of back pay owing as well. So he joined the de la Gardie household as a secretary and then seems to have tried his hand at architecture, in which field he was strongly influenced by Nicodemus Tessin. Destain built a handful of other houses in the neighbourhood as well. They are all much alike — pleasing, straightforward buildings of no very special merit but set in what, at any rate in summer, is a smiling landscape.

One approaches Tullgarn through this pleasant countryside and enters the castle grounds through a gateway in outbuildings lying some distance in front of the main building but arranged on its central axis. From the gateway the drive leads straight to the house through a glorious double avenue of lime trees, the remains of the old baroque garden. An old map shows that the drive was originally flanked by fishponds and that in the woods to either side lay various small buildings — a brewery, stables, an orangery, an ice-house, a pavilion and a smithy. At the back of the house, the courtyard faced’ the sea and a path led down to a jetty and a boathouse. An inventory drawn up in 1733 gives one an excellent idea of how such a Swedish country house wasfurnished. It was only the state rooms that were decked out withany degree of magnificence and the finest room of all was theKing’s Bedroom (the de la Gardies had, of course, to receive royalty every now and then), which had a set of Lille tapestries on the walls and contained a handsome French bed with watered silk hangings trimmed with silver lace. The other state rooms had only painted imitation-tapestries, although in each there were one or two fine pieces of furniture — a Venetian mirror, a japanned and gilt table, a glass chandelier — and all the rooms had window-curtains which were still comparatively rare at that time. Most of the chairs were stiff and upright, but Her Grace had a single easy-chair covered with a brightly-coloured plush. This was about the only concession to comfort in the house. The poor daughters of the household had very bare rooms upstairs and, even though most of the rooms had stone floors (for fear of fire), several had no stoves or other means of heating. This contrast between the splendour of the state rooms and the extreme simplicity of the rest of the house is a striking feature of many of the older Swedish country houses.

Tullgarn’s history as a royal residence begins in 1772 when: the house became the property of the King, Gustavus III, who immediately put it at the disposal of his younger brother, the Duke Frederik Adolf. The Duke was apparently a man of excellent taste and the changes which he instituted at Tullgarn turned it into a charming place, no doubt very different from the dark, northern baroque home of the de la Gardies.

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Tullgarn: A charming lakeside summer-palace of the Swedish monarchy

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