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.

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.

Just above the Arctic Circle, on Norway’s Lofoten Islands, this white 1950 farmhouse sits between wildflower meadows, steep mountains, fjords and white-sand beaches.

Built for Virginia’s Randolph family in the 1730s, the former plantation known as Tuckahoe was home to Thomas Jefferson for seven years of his childhood and still contains the schoolhouse where he received some of his earliest education.

Before the Statue of Liberty stood over New York Harbor, she rose above the rooftops of Paris. A former artist’s atelier is for sale on the street where the Statue of Liberty was built and assembled at the workshops of Gaget, Gauthier et Cie.

Once home to Sophia Loren and her husband, film producer Carlo Ponti, this secluded villa on Rome’s Appian Way sits above an ancient basalt quarry, with Roman mosaics, 2,000-year-old fragments and a history tied to Cinecittà, Rome’s legendary film studio and the heart of Italy’s postwar cinema.

Portrait artist to European royalty and leading cultural figures, Michele Gordigiani reshaped Striano with architect Luigi Del Moro as a house for painting, music and entertaining. Its extraordinary limonaia draws on the same Florentine garden tradition as the famous grotto at the Boboli Gardens.

For a California family dreaming of a home in Paris, Callender Howorth transformed a stripped-back apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower into a deeply personal residence, rebuilding it from the brick up within a historic 1910 building.

Brechin Castle has stood on Scotland’s east coast for more than 700 years, shaped by kings, war, rebellion and generations of aristocratic families. Its grounds include one of Scotland’s most remarkable private gardens.

Behind Great Elm’s soaring glass atrium is a Buckley family estate shaped by Mexican architectural details, political gatherings and guests from Ronald Reagan to Sylvia Plath. Divided in the 1980s, the mansion could now be reunited as a single home.