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The newspaper reports on the ten-year long restoration of Rundale Palace concluded this year, restoring the palace in its former glory.

The palace's ensemble is one of the greatest Latvia's cultural monuments. It was built between 1736 and 1740 by the Italian architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli. The southern side of the palace features a 10 hectare large French garden with various Baroque park elements.

According to New York Times, the person primarily responsible for the palace's restoration, is Imants Lancmanis, a 73-year-old painter, art historian and director. He became the palace’s director in 1975.

"I had my personal visual image of Rundale," he says. The restoration of one ceiling painting took six years; stucco decorations in the White Hall, a chapel turned ballroom with pastoral scenes above the windows, took about a decade. Because there were no wall fabrics, the restoration team had to order 4,400 meters of old pattern replicas. The entire tin roof also had to be replaced, New York Times reports.

The European treasures inside the palace include a portrait of Catherine the Great alongside Russian rulers and a chest of drawers designed by Jean-Henri Riesener, who worked for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The Lancmanis family selected many of the paintings, furniture and textiles from auctions, gathering others from Latvian museums and Russian private collections.

In the gardens outside, Lancmanis says, there are are 2,400 different varieties of roses, and 10,000 in all. "It really is the largest in northeast Europe," Lacmanis says, as cited in New York Times.