Which architect designed Blenheim Palace and castle Howard?
Blenheim Palace was an untrained architect, who usually worked in conjunction with the trained and practical Nicholas Hawksmoor. The duo had recently completed the first stages of the Baroque Castle Howard. This huge Yorkshire mansion was one of England's first houses in the flamboyant European Baroque style. The success of Castle Howard led Marlborough to commission something similar at Woodstock. Blenheim, however, was not to provide Vanbrugh with the architectural plaudits he imagined it would. The fight over funding led to accusations of extravagance and impracticality of design, many of these charges levelled by the Whig factions in power. He found no
Blenheim Palace the bow room corresponds exactly to the saloon in terms of its importance to the two smaller suites. Blenheim Palace was the birthplace of the 1st Duke's famous descendant, Winston Churchill, whose life and times are commemorated by a permanent exhibition in the suite of rooms in which he was born "(marked "K" on the plan)". Blenheim Palace was designed with all its principal and secondary rooms on the "piano nobile", thus there is no great staircase of state: anyone worthy of such state would have no cause to leave the "piano nobile". Insofar as Blenheim does have a grand