Inside Voltaire’s former Paris apartment on Quai Voltaire, where the Enlightenment philosopher spent the final months of his life, received Benjamin Franklin and died in 1778.

Just 15 miles from central London, Ripley Grange looks as though it has stood beside Epping Forest for centuries. In fact, the Tudor-style country house was built between 1928 and 1930 for industrialist Charles Frederick Clark, whose fortune came from carbon paper and typewriter ribbons.

Set in the Pisan hills near Fauglia, the restored villa dates to the early 20th century and is built in the Liberty style, the Italian take on Art Nouveau.

Built at the turn of the 20th century for James E. Nichols and designed by C.P.H. Gilbert, 4 East 79th Street has lived several lives: private Gilded Age mansion, crime scene, diplomatic address, subdivided residence, and ultimately a painstakingly reconstructed single-family home.

Sport Island sits in New York’s Thousand Islands, the St. Lawrence River archipelago along the Canadian border that became one of the Gilded Age’s fashionable summer destinations. Built around 1880 for a prominent Pennsylvania railroad-industrialist family, the property has since undergone a substantial partial restoration.

Designed by Horace Trumbauer, whose work includes the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Gilded Age mansion retains a four-story Carrara marble staircase, Samuel Yellin ironwork, and original Louis XV-style salon rooms across more than 10,000 ft² / 929 m².

A beautifully restored townhouse in Felanitx, the historic market town often described as the “real Mallorca”, combines natural materials and a low-tox approach to construction, with quietly contemporary interiors and a rooftop terrace above village life, steps from the local market.

The nearly 2-acre Shakespeare Chateau Inn & Gardens estate in St. Joseph, Missouri, includes three historic buildings: the 1885 main residence, a carriage house with three apartments, and a pre-Civil War brick house that remains largely undeveloped and in need of restoration.

The 5-bedroom farmhouse was built around a 13th-century watchtower, with views across the rolling Tuscan hills, around 30 minutes from Siena and under an hour from Florence.

After decades at the centre of one of Europe’s most glamorous social worlds, Beatriz Patiño commissioned a private residence of her own beside the famous Patiño Palace in Cascais, near Lisbon.