New Castle Neustadt-Glewe

The baroque palace is a two-story, three-wing complex in the style of Dutch Classicism with a courtyard of honor and stands on hundreds of oak piles. The interior ceilings of the simple country palace are adorned with elaborate stucco work, covering an area of approximately 1600 m². The New Palace contains 32 fireplaces decorated with rosettes, cornices, and figures.

Construction of the palace began in 1618/19 at the behest of Duke Adolf Friedrich I. The plans for a building in the form of Dutch Late Renaissance were drawn up by the ducal master builder Gerhart Evert Pilooth. With his death in 1629, the work came to a halt. Only between 1711 and 1717 was the palace completed under the direction of architect Leonhard Christoph Sturm. The interior decoration took another eight years. After a city fire in Grabow, Christian Ludwig II, who became Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin three years later, resided in the New Palace from 1725 to 1735. Later, comparatively comfortable apartments were set up. After the Second World War, as elsewhere, individual rooms were made available for refugees and those bombed out. During GDR times, the palace was temporarily used for schooling, and until after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it housed a library and a lunch kitchen for workers and students. By then, it had visibly deteriorated. The palace, resting on oak piles, threatened to sink, cracks formed in the walls, and inside, ceilings were secured with nets to protect visitors from falling stucco pieces. After extensive renovation work after 1990, on the foundations, the roof, the exterior walls, and the interiors, the palace now houses a hotel with a restaurant. The stucco ceilings, restored by Polish specialists, are particularly worth seeing.