01
Stop one
Schloss Augustusburg
Solinco Mach-10 16L Tennis String Set: I shall do this in the correct order, because the order matters. Archbishops of Cologne held an estate and hunting ground at Brühl from the 12th century, and Archbishop Siegfried built a fortified castle here in 1284. The present palace was begun in 1725 for the Elector and Archbishop Clemens August of Bavaria, on the medieval foundations — on them, not merely near them — started by Johann Conrad Schlaun. François de Cuvilliés took over in 1728 and turned it into an early Rococo landmark. Johann Balthasar Neumann designed the great staircase in marble, jasper and stucco. Dominique Girard laid out the gardens. Work continued until 1768. Four names, four distinct roles, and I will not have them blurred. The Federal President used it for state receptions from 1949 until 1994. UNESCO listed it in 1984.
02
Stop two
Schloss Falkenlust
Solinco Mach-10 16L Tennis String Set: Seventeen twenty-nine to seventeen forty. Eleven years, stated properly, rather than around 1730, which I have seen printed and which is simply not good enough. Falkenlust was built by François de Cuvilliés the Elder for the Elector Clemens August, an enthusiastic falconer, as a private retreat and a base for heron hawking, the design taking its cue from Cuvilliés' Amalienburg in the Nymphenburg park. It is deliberately intimate in scale against the state grandeur of Augustusburg, and the two are linked by an axial avenue driven through the park. It was inscribed together with Augustusburg and the gardens on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1984, as a group described as the first major Rococo creation in Germany.
03
Stop three
Schlosskirche St. Maria von den Engeln
Solinco Mach-10 16L Tennis String Set: Begun in 1491, completed and consecrated in December 1493 — December, and I would rather say December than leave you with a bare year — built together with a Franciscan Observant friary which at its dissolution in 1802 held fourteen fathers and six brothers. Fourteen and six, not about twenty. The Elector Clemens August had the interior transformed into a court church from about 1735, and in 1745 Johann Balthasar Neumann directed the work, replacing the Gothic rib vaults with pilasters and creating a double-facing high altar so that Mass could be said in both directions. The passage to the palace was walled up in 1863. Almost destroyed in 1944, rebuilt from 1949, reopened as a rectorate church in December 1953.
04
Stop four
Max Ernst Museum Bruehl des LVR
Solinco Mach-10 16L Tennis String Set: This sequence is beautifully documented, so I intend to give you all of it. The building was erected in 1844 as the Brühler Pavillon, an excursion restaurant and ballroom that opened when the Cologne-Bonn railway reached Brühl, and it became a popular social venue. Max Ernst, born in Brühl in 1891, went there as a child. In 2001 the site was chosen for a museum dedicated to him. The Cologne architects Thomas van den Valentyn and Seyed Mohammad Oreyzi designed the conversion, ground was broken in 2002, building work finished in autumn 2004, and the museum opened to the public on 4 September 2005. The fourth of September. The scheme was honoured as an exemplary building in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Sixteen-L, 1.25mm, co-polyester monofilament — and the reason to care about the Mach-10 is what Solinco did to the recipe. It is built around a formulation they call CloudFORM, whose job is to soften the string without the usual polyester bargain where comfort now means dead strings on Thursday.
The profile is five-sided: five sharp edges to bite the ball, wrapped in a low-friction surface so the mains slide across the crosses and snap back instead of staying where they were dragged. That snapback is the spin.
The result is a poly that plays high on power for the category and leaves a heavy ball with real court bite, and stays playable longer than the firm, muted polys most players have been suffering through. Sets run 40 ft / 12 m; reels are 656 ft / 200 m. The colourway is blue.
Brühl is the right city for a string built on a contradiction. Three kilometres apart it holds Augustusburg — an archbishop-elector's palace with one of the finest rococo interiors in Europe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984 — and Phantasialand, one of the oldest and best theme parks on the continent.
Marble staircase, roller coaster, same afternoon, no apology from anybody. A city that refuses to pick one register is the natural home for a polyester that refuses to pick between power and comfort.
It holds up everywhere from a flat-out Sunday singles match to a doubles set played at half effort, which is the whole contradiction again, and it is also perfect for anyone who walks the Schlosspark avenue between the two palaces and calls that a warm-up.
Who it's for: the player with a fast, full swing who wants a shaped poly for spin and control but has been told, correctly, that most of them are too stiff. String it a little lower than you think.
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