Where in the world is this castle?

August 10, 2013 1:57 AM

I just accidentally deleted a much loved picture on my pinterest and despite a lot of searching, cannot find it anywhere. Does this building sound familiar? It was old, white and European and had amazing brown line drawings of architectural details painted around the doors and windows. I think it might have been a minor Swedish or German castle but everything I find when googling with those terms is a lot grander than what I'm looking for. The trompe l'oeil was almost convincing from a distance but up close it had a simple hand painted charm - there was no shading or rulers involved. I really enjoy looking at buildings with hand painted exteriors (eg. Burkina Faso houses) so if you can suggest some others for me to look at, that would be fantastic too.
posted by Wantok to Home & Garden (7 answers total)

Try this, Nicholas II castle.
posted by Ahmed_Nabil at 2:24 AM on August 10, 2013

Is sgraffito like this kind of what you're talking about? How about Dresden Castle?
posted by theory at 3:15 AM on August 10, 2013

It wasn't by any chance the ball court of Emperor Rudolf II in the Prague castle district? (Another photo, of a detail.)
posted by brianogilvie at 6:33 AM on August 10, 2013

Best answer: I don't know the castle you are talking about, but I've seen a lot of painted houses in Switzerland and Austria, some handpainted, some not. Some examples: Stein am Rhein, Bern, or this, another Swiss one, and another, Basel - there's lots.

Also Germany has quite a few, for example this, this. Search term for the German version is Lüftlmalerei

A lot of churches and monasteries in Romania include trompe l'oiel techniques, since painting was much cheaper than carving arches etc; pictures tend to focus on the more figurative paintings, since they are more colourful, but most of them have some painted colomn, portal etc. Examples (more general painting): Voronet, Moldovita
posted by miorita at 6:47 AM on August 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

Another from the Czech Republic, Český Krumlov Castle?
posted by bluefly at 6:50 AM on August 10, 2013

look in your web history, maybe? You may be able to find a URL that will lead you back. Or your browser's image cache.

Here's what a bit of googling for cache viewing/extraction tools produced:

point the browser to about:cache in firefox or chrome, cache location for IE here.

Lifehacker article -- mentions FileJuicer trialware for Safari's monolithic cache file (which one imagines is some kind of flat-file database).

Nirsoft offers cache viewing Windows utilities for IE and Chrome.

PHP script to extract actual files from the Chrome cache.

There may be better tools out there.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:48 AM on August 10, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks everyone (and especially miorita for some great links) but no dice unfortunately. The suggestions are a lot more urban and a lot lot more decorated than what I'm looking for. Some more details I've dragged from the dusty recesses of my brain though, just in case:

I think the term palace is misleading, I vaguely remember thinking that's a palace? It may have been a hunting lodge or summer palace. It only looked a few stories high and was almost entirely just white plaster. The walls were very thick with deep set windows, which suggests to me it was built to cope with a northern climate. There was no shading or colouring in at all, just brown and slightly wobbly outlines.

It was a really beautiful building, here's hoping I find it again one day.
posted by Wantok at 8:27 PM on August 11, 2013