A Room Between Two Worlds

Inside a family castle, artist Marie Hartig brought together two distant landscapes—and added a new chapter to an old house.

The Austrian countryside is still there. Its trees, birds and familiar sense of place remain part of the view. But as the eye moves around the walls, another world begins to appear: tropical plants, unfamiliar foliage and birds belonging to a warmer climate.

This is where Austria meets Brazil.

When artist Marie Hartig was invited to paint the room, she was not simply asked to decorate its walls. She was given something more personal to work with: the different places that had become part of the family’s life.

Rather than separating those worlds, she allowed them to grow into one another.

Perhaps that is why the room feels so intimate. It is not only about where the family lives, but also about where they have lived, what they remember and what they chose to bring home with them.

A Castle Does Not Have to Remain Frozen in Time

A castle remains alive because each generation forms its own relationship with it.

Sometimes that change is architectural. Sometimes it appears through a new use for an old room, a piece of contemporary art or simply the way a family chooses to live within spaces shaped long before they arrived.

What I especially love about Marie Hartig’s mural is that it does not try to imitate an earlier period or invent a version of the castle’s history. It is honest about belonging to the present. At the same time, it does not compete with the room around it.

Bringing Part of a Life Home

Homes are rarely made from one place alone.

We bring back objects, colours, habits and memories from elsewhere, often without consciously deciding to do so. Over time, they settle into the rooms around us and become part of how home feels.

In this castle, that process has been made visible. The result is beautiful, but its meaning goes beyond decoration. It shows how heritage can remain personal: not as something preserved at a distance, but as a setting in which new memories and identities are still allowed to take shape.

Perhaps this is when a castle truly becomes a home—not when every room perfectly reflects its past, but when the people living there are able to leave something of themselves within it.

If you could bring one remembered landscape into a room of your own, where would it be?

Discover more stories from inside Europe’s living castles with World Castle Club.