Śmiełów Palace

The palace occupies a horseshoe-shaped plan, its two wings spreading roughly forty-three metres apart and linked to a central, two-storey main block by semicircular galleries. The principal façade is marked by a four-column portico using oversized columns in the giant order, a composition that follows a Palladian villa model. At least some of the service buildings around the yard, including the stable, coach house and granary, belong to the same original design campaign.

The two wings are covered with a Kraków roof (a regional pitched roof with a steeper lower slope and a shallower upper slope). The western wing contained guest accommodation, while the eastern wing had a separate entrance from the garden and housed the kitchen, establishing a clear separation between public rooms and service areas.

Inside, the plan is irregular. An octagonal salon projects into the garden façade and does not open directly onto the main stair, while the ground and first floors are almost the same height, producing a strong horizontal rhythm between storeys. The layout includes many niches and small rooms that break the larger spaces into a sequence of more intimate interiors.

Beneath the projecting octagonal salon lies an eight-sided hall covered by a barrel vault with lunettes, which was used as the meeting room for a Masonic lodge; a so-called Masonic altar is located in the stairwell. Decorative painting by the Smuglewicz brothers appears in the principal reception rooms: the oval salon contains an iconographic program drawing on episodes from Homer’s Iliad, and the blue salon held a cycle of rustic frescoes modelled on Pompeian wall-painting. Those mural schemes survive today only in two rooms on the ground floor.

The palace stands within a managed landscape park that reaches the forests along the Warta River. From the house there are views across meadows in the wide valley and toward a ridge whose outline is punctuated by the church at Brzostkowo. The museum preserves the historic grounds, including the small commemorative “Zosia’s Garden” and a monument dedicated to Adam Mickiewicz.