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Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Buscot Park, and Waddesdon Manor, England
- University of South Carolina Press
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Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Buscot Park, and Waddesdon Manor, England ELEGANCE IS A TERM THAT HAS MULTIPLE and sometimes diverse definitions. It generally implies a quality of being refined, stylish, or, perhaps, in the fashion of the day. But elegance can also imply a sublime level of comfort and an inviting freshness. Such a comparison might be made between Waddesdon Manor, the 1877 chateau of Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839–1898), and Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, a superb Orient Express hotel and garden. Ferdinand de Rothschild was an omnivorous collector of fine arts. He had Waddesdon , his elegant, late-empire-style chateau, constructed to contain his collections and to immerse himself in the company of the English royalty and gentry whom he lavishly entertained. He attracted the well-to-do of Western Europe to his palace to pay homage to his wealth and aesthetic sensibility and perhaps to cast envious eyes on his Reynolds and Gainsborough portraits, his Meissen and Sevres porcelain, his lacquered English and French furniture, his porcelain sculpture, his elegant marble statues, his Savonnerie carpets, and his centuries-old Continental tapestries. Waddesdon Manor is the second most-visited of Britain’s outstanding National Trust properties. On a bank holiday Monday in May, the place was teaming with ordinary folk enjoying a day on a larger-than-life, Biltmore-scale estate. Waddesdon resonated with style from its steep, blue-slate-roofed, Chambord-styled corner towers to the unique collections adorning its interior. Above every mantle there was a superb cut-glass mirror, centered with magnificent French clocks, heavy with the voluptuous figures of Greek and Roman goddesses attended by cherubs and pursued by mortals or gods as handsome as Apollo and as sure-footed as Mercury. The clocks, as always in National Trust properties, ticked the correct time in unison . Matching pairs of blue Sevres or hand-painted Meissen urns adorned the mantles and were dispersed as focal points on various tables. The house and garden are classic French. The walls and furnishings in many of the rooms were acquired as a result of Haussman’s widening of the boulevards of Paris in the mid-1800s. Rothschild had the wherewithal to buy unique, priceless antiquities dispersed in the excesses of the French Revolution. The manor house was designed by GabrielHippolyte Destailleur (1822–1893) and was finished in 1880. The garden was laid out by Elie Laine and contains a wealth of exquisite Italian statues. The ensemble is comparable to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, with its formal gardens and French architectural style. 86 England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland Waddesdon and Biltmore are elegant and refined, but are they comfortable? Our world of elegance is defined by an inordinately higher level of creature comforts. Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons represents the apotheosis of the greatest creature comforts available through twenty-first-century technology combined with the refined taste and good judgment without which stylish, elegant, comfortable living is impossible . Only a thirty-minute drive from the Rothschild estate, just below Oxford near Great Milton, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons is an elegant Relais and Château manor house with every creature comfort. Our suite, “Blanc en Blanc,” with its wrought-iron entry gate, led to a stone path embedded with ancient millstones. The path’s borders had a mass of yellow-centered, white daisies that lay at the feet of perfectly clipped and rounded yews. The entire entrance to our suite was enclosed by an old stone wall so that its natural effect was that of a private garden within a larger garden. The sense of privacy was enhanced by neatly trimmed borders of different trees, which extended above our small garden’s four-foot-high walls. There was much more outside our suite. The garden with its Japanese Tea Room House and three lakes was replete with ducks and the charm of the sky’s reflections. There were blue and white lupines and delphiniums growing in the borders, and while pink peonies edged the huge vegetable garden. The vegetable garden is the picking plot of Chef Raymond Blanc, the noted French culinary king of Le Manoir. Our greatest delight was in the chef’s dinner. I had sea bass with a white sauce of herbs from the garden. Fred had a filet of beef with a dark, rich wine sauce, plentifully served with mushrooms. Raymond Blanc had grown up in France in the village of Besancon. There his father had drawn...