The 2,300-room Palace of Versailles just outside of Paris receives a seemingly constant stream of repairs. Just last year, for instance, an American-French coalition launched a restoration inside the state apartment of Sun King Louis XIV. Elsewhere, experts have been restoring one bedroom within the King’s Private Apartments, which Louis XV built and Louis XVI used, since the 1980s. Now, that project has finally come to an end. Crews just placed the very last details replicating precisely what this princely bedroom looked like on October 6, 1789—the very day that the French royal family made its final departure from Versailles.

Louis XV’s beleaguered reign lasted pretty much his entire life, from 1715 to 1774. During that time, he made scores of additions to his father’s grandiose palace, including a suite of more secluded private apartments, spanning dining rooms, laboratories, and more.

Louis XVI’s bedroom at Versailles. Photo: © Château de Versailles / C. Fouin.

This particular bedroom was built in 1728. French architect Jacques V Gabriel and his son Ange-Jacques Gabriel, who both served France’s royal family, designed the space together. Antwerp-born sculptor, cabinetmaker, and ornamentalist Jacques Verberckt, meanwhile, provided structural decorations such as the space’s impossibly delicate Rocaille embellishments, just as he did for other parts of Versailles—like, the Queen’s Room in 1730.

The resulting maximalist, gilded bedroom comes to life courtesy of several expansive tapestry installations. These would have evolved between the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XIV across imposing brocades, rich velvet, and silks produced in Lyon, demonstrating the shift from dense Rococo towards the lighter Neoclassical aesthetic. Such fabrics would have shifted within a single year, too, with the seasons.

Detail of the King’s apartment at Versailles. Photo: © Château de Versailles / C. Fouin.

But, in their effort to recreate this bedroom exactly as it looked on October 6, 1789 the collaborative and intergenerational crew of curators, historians and craftspeople that restored the King’s bedroom consulted surviving fabric scraps from that time. Using these samples, expert weavers managed to totally recreate the original weaves, even using traditional techniques.

Versailles faced looting in the heat of the French Revolution, and the King’s apartments famously featured the most coveted furniture in the entire Palace. Among the many furnishings in this Versailles apartment—from cabinetry to scientific instruments—replacing the bed provoked noteworthy vexation.

Canopy of the bed in the King’s apartment at Versailles. Photo: © Château de Versailles / C. Fouin.

The palace initiated a specific project to solve the problem in the early 2010s. Although their craftspeople couldn’t find any preserved preparatory drawings for this room’s central feature, they were able to utilize “highly precise archival descriptions to reconstruct the shapes, volumes, and decorative motifs of the bed that disappeared during the Revolution,” as the Palace noted.

Those same artisans took several thousand hours to carve the replacement bed from fine-grained linden wood before applying traditional water-gilding in the palace’s on-site workshop. Versailles has declared that returning this centerpiece to its alcove “restores not only the decorative coherence of the whole, but also the function and symbolic significance of this space, both a place of life of the sovereign and refined expression of the monarchy on the eve of the Revolution.”

As of today, the rarefied space is open to both independent and guided tours.