A Manor with Many Names and Many Lives
Zaļenieki Manor wears its history in layers. Its popular moniker, Zaļā (Green) Manor, echoes the German Grünhof, a nod to its early use as a ducal retreat “in the green”. The site’s story reaches back to the Livonian Order, with records from 1541 and later ownership by Gotthard Kettler, the first Duke of Courland and Semigallia. Yet the silhouette we admire today emerged between 1768 and 1775, when Duke Biron ordered a new residence and allocated an astonishing 200,000 bricks to the project. The result is a house that still reads clearly from afar—a disciplined composition with projecting rizalīti on both long elevations, a different treatment toward the park, and a measured rhythm of openings and cornices. Unlike many estates, Zaļenieki’s façades have never been fundamentally altered. The original stucco, profiles, and decorative details survived, allowing visitors to read the eighteenth century directly from the walls.

Between Baroque and Classicism: Rastrelli’s Idea, Jensen’s Hand
Zaļenieki is a rare stylistic duet. The initial concept is attributed to Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, author of the Stroganov Palace and master of late Baroque theater, while Severin Jensen, his Danish-born collaborator in Courland, carried the building to completion—refining, simplifying, and pulling it toward Classicism. That dialogue is legible in the details: unusual column capitals, rusticated basement window surrounds, and the animated façades that hint at Baroque flourish yet resolve into Classical equilibrium. Inside, nineteenth-century interventions—from glazed-tile stoves with ornamented cornices to a newel stair, a marble neo-Rococo fireplace, and painted ceilings with illusory coffering—added fresh chapters without erasing the original intent. In recent restoration, probing beneath later finishes in the central hall revealed eighteenth-century wall paintings depicting illusionistic classical space, rare survivals that confirm the house’s early ambition: to stage antiquity through local craft and imported taste.

A Working Estate: Stables, “Flower House,” and the Landscape Park
Zaļenieki was never just a manor; it was a compact world. By 1925, an inventory listed over thirty buildings: beyond the stables, barns, and servants’ houses, there were charmingly specific structures—the “flower house,” “wine house,” even a “peach building.” Many nineteenth-century utility façades still carry their birth year—1860—chiseled into fieldstone. The estate’s 27–28-hectare park remains its soft-spoken masterpiece. Anchored by water—a lake and ponds—and composed for pleasure, fruit, and kitchen gardens in eighteenth-century terms, the grounds favor quiet shade and slow vistas. Veteran trees—European larch, beech, silver maple, and a notable goba (elm)—punctuate lawns and pathways. From the park side, the manor’s different central projection reveals another face: more ceremonial, more attuned to garden theater. The whole ensemble illustrates how architecture and landscape were once designed as a single experience, a sequence of approaches, pauses, and framed views.

From Ducal Residence to School: A Century of Learning in Place
History tested Zaļenieki. After the 1795 incorporation of the Duchy into the Russian Empire, the estate passed to Prince Alexander of Württemberg, then to Alexis von Scheping, and eventually to Count von Medem. Mid-nineteenth-century owners replanned interiors and introduced decorative stoves and ceiling paintings, while keeping the exterior intact. The agrarian reforms of 1920 nationalized the property, setting a new destiny: education. Since the 1920s, the manor has housed a succession of schools—from a state gymnasium and home-economics school to agricultural institutes and, today, the Zaļenieki Commercial and Crafts Secondary School. Workshops now occupy former service ranges: a Restorers’ House offers masonry, wood, upholstery, restoration technologies, 3D design, and modeling studios, with drawing and theory classrooms nearby. In other words, Zaļenieki’s best preservation strategy has been use—the daily, careful occupation of rooms by people who learn, make, and steward the building while they study within it.

Reading the House Today: What to Notice When You Visit
Step through the vestibule and let your eyes adjust to proportion. Zaļenieki is not showy; its two stories unfold with calm geometry, each door leaf, parquet fragment, and cornice assisting the composition. In the central hall, recent research glimpsed the illusionistic classicism that once wrapped the space. Along the way, look for the dialogue between old and newer finishes—the painted ceilings with ampir and Renaissance motifs, the crisp lines of Jensen’s classicizing touch, the tile stoves that once rationed warmth room by room. Outside, walk the stone bridge across water toward the service quarter and imagine the estate at work. Then return to the park elevation, where the house, framed by linden and oak, shows its ceremonial profile. The experience is balanced—architecture as a lesson in measure, landscape as restorative pause—and it remains one of Courland’s clearest early-classical statements.

Why Zaļenieki Matters
Because façades survive intact, because original stuccowork still reads under the light, because interior evidence can still be studied, taught, and—where appropriate—reconstructed, Zaļenieki stands among Latvia’s most instructive manor houses. Its authorship—Rastrelli’s idea refined by Jensen—makes it a textbook of transition from Baroque to Classicism. Its park keeps the intended approach sequences and water-bound horizons. Its school keeps the rooms alive and funds the care they need. Above all, Zaļenieki shows how built heritage can be lived heritage: students carry portfolios where noble guests once carried game; workshops hum where carriages once rolled. In this living classroom, the past is neither frozen nor lost—it is used, understood, and quietly renewed every day.