Schloss Rosenau was the birthplace and boyhood home of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who, in 1840, became the husband and consort of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

In 1704, the Rosenau family finally lost the property when it was sold as a summer residence to the Austrian Freiherr Ferdinand Johann Adam von Pernau (1660-1731), who had been a member of the Privy Council of Albert V, Duke of Saxe-Coburg.

As a long-term experiment, he released a large number of young common chaffinches in and around Rosenau between 1704 and 1720, after first teaching them to sing like tree pipits.

[2][3][4] He was known as the Freiherr von Pernau zu Rosenau,[5] and his most important publication, printed at Coburg in 1707, was titled Lessons, as to what one can do with the lovely Creatures, the Birds, either by Capture, by Probing of their Characteristics and Taming, or by other forms of Instruction, for Pleasure and Profit.

Between 1808 and 1817 the main house was fully renovated and reconstructed in the Gothic Revival style under the supervision of the Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

On 26 August 1819, Ernest's first wife, Princess Louise, gave birth in the house to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819 – 1861).

[16] Elizabeth Longford later wrote of the weeks before Albert's departure to woo Victoria: ...above all, he adored his home, the Rosenau, a romantic little Schloss outside Coburg...

Prince Albert had spent September at the peaceful Rosenau, his happy birthplace, fortifying himself against the expected humiliations of Windsor.

[19] The Tsarevich of Russia and his future wife Alix of Hesse and by Rhine visited the house in April 1894, on the day after their own engagement.

Victoria, titular Empress consort of Russia, was the mother of Vladimir Kirillovich (1917-1992), head of the Romanov family and claimant to the Russian throne.

A small eleven-sided library is decorated with paintings of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's The Travels of Thiodolf the Icelander.