Old Orangery, Łazienki Park

The Old Orangery, now called the Stara Oranżeria by the Łazienki museum, was built for King Stanisław II August Poniatowski between 1785 and 1788 according to the museum. The design chosen was that of the court architect, the Italian-born Domenico (Dominik) Merlini; Szymon Bogumił Zug had also submitted plans. The building was meant to shelter the garden's orange trees and other exotics through the winter, but the king also made it a cultural venue: the east wing received a court theatre, opened on 6 September 1788, and the west wing a sculpture gallery decorated to designs by Johann Christian Kamsetzer.

In the nineteenth century the building was reworked in 1839–1840 under the architect Ludwik Kozubowski, who altered the façades among other things. Conservation work was completed in 1950 and the building opened to visitors from 1962; it has been on the monuments register since 1965.

Between 2012 and 2016 a major restoration, funded chiefly by EEA and Norway Grants and by the Polish Ministry of Culture, repaired the roof, the attic on the main façade and the building services. Conservators uncovered wall paintings from 1787–1788 that followed Kamsetzer's designs, long thought never to have been carried out. The building reopened to the public at the end of April 2016.

The plan forms a long rectangle with returning wings: the orangery proper in the centre, the theatre to the east, and to the west the former winter garden that became a sculpture gallery. The single-storey south front has seventeen bays of tall round-arched windows divided by pilasters, in a late, austere classicism that contrasts with the Palace on the Isle. Beneath the floors, the restoration revealed a hot-air heating system reminiscent of Roman hypocausts, originally fed by five furnaces.

The Royal Theatre is built entirely of wood, which gives it excellent acoustics, and seats about 200 on two levels, with nine boxes upstairs and the central one reserved for the king. Painted illusionistic galleries filled with spectators by Jan Bogumił Plersch extend the auditorium; on the ceiling Apollo drives his quadriga among genii, and medallions honour Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine and Molière. Eight stucco female figures holding gilded candlesticks, designed by André Le Brun, complete the scheme. The museum describes it as one of the few authentic eighteenth-century court theatres left in Europe and the only one in Poland.

The orangery no longer serves as a plant house. Its horticultural role survives mainly outdoors, in the walled Orangery Garden, restored to its historical layout, where potted citrus trees are set out for the warm season as they once were.

Inside, the Royal Sculpture Gallery displays more than fifty works from Stanisław August's collection, mostly eighteenth-century plaster casts of celebrated antiques such as the Farnese Hercules and the Apollo Belvedere, arranged in the Kamsetzer colonnade. A two-level Gallery of Polish Sculpture shows nineteenth- and twentieth-century works, including pieces by Xawery Dunikowski.

The Old Orangery stands within Łazienki Park, on the Myśliwiecka street side, next to the walled Orangery Garden. A visit takes in the Royal Sculpture Gallery, the Gallery of Polish Sculpture and the Royal Theatre, whose wooden auditorium, preserved in its eighteenth-century state, is the highlight. In the warmer months the walled garden with its potted citrus recalls the building's original purpose, and the rest of the park, including the New Orangery and the Palace on the Isle, invites a longer walk.