Grand Trianon, Versailles, France
Louis XIV built the Grand Trianon to escape the rigid formality of the palace he'd created. The pink marble colonnades and smaller scale were his version of a retreat — intimate by Versailles standards, which is still considerably grand by anyone else's. It tells you something that even the Sun King needed somewhere to decompress. © Sorin Craciun, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

More on this story