Dreaming is allowed.
At least you can dream about these five luxury properties with large, formal gardens, which were recently featured in the online magazine Luxury Defined by Christie’s International Real Estate. And if you have the necessary funds, you can even make your dreams come true, because these gems are all for sale.
Luxury Defined writes on the topic of formal gardens: They are an outward expression of a great estate’s grand design. By imposing order and symmetry on nature, their designers sought to delight – and impress. And impress they did!
The Palace of Versailles’s gardens are integral to its overall design. Louis XIV’s principal gardener and landscape architect, André Le Nôtre, organized the gardens on two axes, creating the illusion of an infinite vista called “the Grande Perspective.” In 18th-century England, a new perspective emerged: While Palladian order and symmetry defined such great country houses as Blenheim Palace, the English landscape designers used great artifice to imitate nature. Their rolling parklands, punctuated by copses, reflecting pools, fountains, ponds, and serpentine lakes, were all as rigorously composed as a great symphony.
Lancelot “Capability” Brown, England’s greatest gardener, compared his designs to the structure of a sentence: “There I make a comma, and there, where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.”
The following five homes with magnificent formal gardens are designed in the French and English traditions and some exquisite variations.