Gâteau at the château: Lord Rothschild’s latest folly

Waddesdon, the fake French castle built by a grieving Rothschild in the Buckinghamshire hills, always had a confectionery element. Now you have the real thing. Next month, the farm reveals Wedding cake, a huge 12 m pink, green, blue and yellow fantasy built with 25,000 handmade ceramic tiles. It is adorned with cherubs, dolphins, birds, and saints (also all ceramic), and features working water features and a canopy of LED-illuminated “stars.” Couples will be able to get married inside and climb the three levels of the cake to enjoy the view. Even taking into account the family taste for the opulent and refined (the famous “goût Rothschild”), this is something. But what is this? Crazy?

“Yeah!” says Juana Vasconcelos, 51 years old, the Portuguese artist who conceived it, although she relaxes with the terminology. But Jacob, the fourth Baron Rothschild, custodian of the Waddesdon Estate and the man who ordered the cake, is more demanding. “It shouldn’t be crazy, it should be stronger than that,” says the 91-year-old, who bought a book on Georgian follies the other day. “Shall we start by saying it’s a temple?”

The cake –or temple– is many things: a new attraction for waddesdon, which is owned by the National Trust but still run by the Rothschild Foundation; another avant-garde architectural commission from “Lord R”, as everyone here calls him, a collector and philanthropist of the arts who financed the construction of the very severe and modernist Flint House on the grounds as well; and a continuation of Vasconcelos’ own work and concerns. He has wowed Venice, Versailles and elsewhere with his outsized comments on female domesticity and desire.

The temple fits in very well in Waddesdon: “It’s a pretty crazy place, isn’t it?”

Above all, though, it’s the height of the relationship between the artist and the baron, who clearly adore each other like chalk and cheese. Vasconcelos, in a large pink jumper embellished with a pink butterfly brooch, nicely complements Lord R, dapper in a pale blue, aqua V-neck shirt, when they meet at Waddesdon’s Dairy. (Typically for Waddesdon, the Dairy is not a shed with a pail of milk, but a three-winged brick mansion on the outskirts of the property; a Reynolds hangs in our meeting room.) This is his third collaboration. The first was when Vasconcelos offered him The pavilion sculpture (a huge wrought iron teapot) for a 2012 exhibition in Waddesdon Gardens. “That was when I first saw his work properly and really fell in love with it,” says Lord Rothschild.

He then asked her to create lafita, two huge chandelier sculptures that are made from bottles of Château Lafite, his family’s signature. These have been in the Park since 2015. So when Vasconcelos told Lord Rothschild about his idea for a pastel sculpture, there seemed to be a certain inevitability.

“I told him that he had an impossible project,” Vasconcelos smiles. “I call them ‘impossible projects’: the things I’d like to do, but to do them you need to find the right collection and the right place. You have the idea, but it has to be realized by someone who understands it, who says: ‘I can see it too’”. She knows it, especially since she just worked on Dior women’s AW23 showwhere he designed the entire set at the Jardin des Tuileries: a surreal tentacular installation made of feathers, fabric, sequins and more.

“I was thinking of these great collectors, these great names in culture, that you are a part of,” he tells Lord Rothschild, “and Monsieur [Bernard] arnault also. You don’t make these big objects out of thin air. There is a story behind this… you need to commit to the personality, we need to understand each other to do such a big project and do it well. Not many people in the world can do that.” It’s like Leonardo with the Medici, she says, or the Guggenheims with various modernists. Lord Rothschild sits next to her, listening but a little embarrassed. “Enough about me!” he finally cries.

The darling seems just as good, as the cake has taken longer than expected to be made, and its construction is up to date. The delays were caused by the pandemic, the logistical hassle of making each individual piece by hand, the back and forth between Buckinghamshire and Vasconcelos’ vast studio in Lisbon (the pastel is also a tribute to Portuguese Baroque). “We had some hiccups and problems,” he shrugs. “It’s like a piece of crafts, like weaving with ceramics.”

“He has a fantastic temper,” he bonds with Lord Rothschild, “but this has been going on for over four years. Have you ever been discouraged? he asks her. “No!” she cries, almost surprised. He did? “I had ups and downs. I didn’t lose heart.”

When Vasconcelos was asked to be the first woman to open the Venice Biennale in 2005, she gave them a girlfriend (Girlfriend), a white sculpture, which is actually a spider made with 25,000 tampons. When she took on Versailles in 2012, she created a large wedding ring made from car trim, her “diamond” made from whiskey glasses. The cake, for her, concludes a matrimonial trilogy. Only two people, she points out, can reach the top of the building, on parallel spiral stairs, but they don’t have to be the traditional bride and groom.

“You can have two women, two men, people who don’t know each other… You’ll have an awkward situation where you go up and someone else goes up and pop! – Are you there. And that’s like today, where people use Tinder and get married.” Lord Rothschild offers another angle. “Two people, old people like me, when they saw it they said, could you renew your vows on it?”

The temple also fits very well into the larger history of Waddesdon. First, “because we have a large collection of porcelain here,” says Lord Rothschild. “Meissen, Sèvres, etc. So I could excuse it by saying it’s an extension of the collection.” But beyond that, he’s like, “I mean, it’s a pretty crazy place overall, isn’t it?”

Waddesdon was built in the 1870s and 1880s as perhaps the ultimate distraction from the grief of Ferdinand de Rothschild, whose wife Evelina had died in childbirth. “He was a profoundly melancholy man and had this fantasy of bringing together elements from Loire castles to create Waddesdon,” says Lord Rothschild of his ancestor. Ferdinand filled the mansion with gold and Gainsborough and, as stated, lots of Sèvres. “I mean, he’s almost as crazy as pie, isn’t he? There is a bond of eccentricity and romance and, indeed, beauty.” Do you think Ferdinand would have liked the cake? “Umm…” A two second pause. “I think he would do.”

As for his own contribution to the estate, he persists in being modest. “My weakness and strength is that I get carried away by his”, he says, nodding towards Vasconcelos. The Cake has been “by far the most challenging” he has commissioned. Does the legacy go through your head a lot? “No,” he answers quickly. “Not exactly. I mean, I’m proud that he’s going to be here, is that part of the legacy? I guess so, in that context. Vasconcelos, of course, is more vocal. “100 years from now, people will say, ‘The The Rothschilds had made a wonderful collection of pottery here, but then Jacob Rothschild was even crazier than everyone else, and he made a wedding cake!’” Lord R, as always, nods graciously, still processing his latest folly.

The wedding cake opens at waddesdon, Buckinghamshire, on June 8. Available to reserve until October 26