American coming-of-age supernatural comedy horror television series based upon the character Wednesday Addams from The Addams Family. Created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, it stars Jenna Ortega as the title character, with Catherine Zeta-Jones, Luis Guzmán, Isaac Ordonez, Gwendoline Christie, Riki Lindhome, Jamie McShane, Fred Armisen, and Christina Ricci appearing in supporting roles. Four out of the eight episodes are directed by Tim Burton, who also serves as executive producer. It revolves around the titular character, who attempts to solve a monster mystery at her school.
According to Architectural Digest, When the new series Wednesday on Netflix needed a property in a sleepy Vermont hamlet to stand in for Nevermore Academy, a castle in Romania turned out to be the perfect place. Jenna Ortega’s titular character is shipped off to the New England boarding school for outcasts—including werewolves and gorgons—in the supernatural comedy. The latest incarnation of The Addams Family saga sees the now mordant teenager unhappily enrolled at her parents Gomez (Luis Guzmán) and Morticia’s (Catherine Zeta-Jones) alma mater, an unconventional institution nestled in a forbidding forest.
In reality, much of the Gothic-style school’s exteriors belong to the Cantacuzino Castle located in the Romanian mountain town of Bușteni. The neo-Romanian palace in the Carpathian Mountains was the summer home of über-wealthy aristocrat and politician Prince Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino, who died there just two years after the house was completed in 1911.
As a filming location for Wednesday, the castle’s design was supplemented with special effects somewhat inspired by Bucharest’s “eclectic pile of architecture,” according to series production designer Mark Scruton. Some of Wednesday’s Nevermore interiors—like principal Larissa Weems’s (Gwendoline Christie) office and the adjacent railed mezzanine—were shot at the historic Monteoru House in Bucharest.
Without further ado, here’s a brief education on the opulent estate.
The carved stone castle with four pavilions and arcade balconies—including a central one outside the ballroom—was influenced by Romanian Brâncovenesc architecture, a late-17th- and early-18th-century style that mixed Byzantine, Ottoman, and late Renaissance details. (CGI was used to make Nevermore’s roofline mimic that of the Addams family mansion.) Built on land that had been home to the Cantacuzino family’s hunting lodge, the 3,148-square-meter manor was designed by architect Grigore Cerchez, and took almost 10 years to finish. It’s surrounded by lush gardens with an impressive courtyard, a watch tower, stone-paved alleys that lead to a family church, fountains, and a grotto.
The ornate interior boasts cantilevered and soffit-like exposed-beam ceilings with stuccowork and stucco marble, Venetian Murano glass-stained windows, white limestone fireplaces with gold foil and inlaid mosaics, Italian parquet and mosaic floors, oak doors carved with vegetal ornamentation and the Cantacuzino coat of arms in brass, and oak and marble staircases with stone and wrought iron handrails. The castle’s most notable space may be its ballroom with a portrait gallery featuring a dozen of Cantacuzino’s ancestors on Cordoba leather, another gallery adorned with 27 family members’ coats of arms, and two fresco galleries. All of these features are highlighted by the home’s one remaining original lighting fixture: a 2000-plus pound chandelier that’s a replica of the much larger original hanging in Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia Grand Museum.
When Romania became a satellite of the USSR after World War II, the castle was nationalized, and all of its original furnishings, art, and even light fixtures were looted. Used as a hospital until president Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown in 1989, the castle was then returned to Cantacuzino’s great granddaughter, Ioana Cantacuzino. In 2008, German lawyer and property developer Kurt Neuschitzer bought the ancestral home, hoping to develop a golf and ski resort for which he’s still awaiting government approval.
Sources: Architectural Digest
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