The Calmettes were Huguenots, driven out of France to Holland generations earlier. Antoine's father worked as a diplomat, serving terms in Switzerland and Portugal before landing in Denmark, where the family was naturalised and recognised as Danish nobility in 1776. In January 1777 Antoine married Catharina Elisabeth Iselin, daughter of Reinhard Iselin, a Swiss baron who had also emigrated. In 1783 he was appointed prefect of Møn, and in the same year he bought six hectares on the island's eastern coast, in the parish of Magleby. He was not buying a residence. The family's working life ran out of Marienborg, on the other side of the island, and this was to be somewhere they could disappear for a few days or a few weeks with invited guests. Antoine lived from 1752 to 1803; Lise from 1759 to 1805.

The ground had to be drained, cleared and levelled before anything could be planted on it. Then it was landscaped to the standards of the day and stocked with trees, some of them rare in Denmark: oak, sweet chestnut, walnut, mulberry, spruce, cypress. Water is the essential ingredient of a Romantic garden, and Liselund has ponds threaded through gently rolling terrain, arranged so that the view keeps changing as you walk. The house went up in 1792 in French neoclassical style under a thatched roof — small, T-shaped, with the reception rooms below and nine bedrooms above, the interior probably fitted out by Joseph Christian Lillie, the leading decorator of the moment. Andreas Kirkerup, one of the foremost landscape architects of the age, designed both the house and the grounds. The park was finished in 1795. It is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of Romantic English gardening in Scandinavia.

Scattered through the park are buildings that belong somewhere else entirely, each one placed to suit its setting and to shift the visitor's mood on arrival. The Swiss House, Schweizerhytten, stands at the foot of a Bronze Age burial mound near the entrance drive; it housed the gardener, but under its thatch were beautifully decorated rooms where guests could sleep. The Norwegian House sits in the roughest, most broken ground, near the cliffs, where the terrain does a passable impression of Norway. On the western hill, looking over the largest lake to the sea beyond, a Chinese summerhouse offered tea and a prospect. There are monuments too, most of them about love and friendship rather than conquest or the dead. Skrivermonumentet, a gift from Lise to her husband in the 1780s, is inscribed A l'amitié pure — to pure friendship. A marker beside the stream running down to the cliffs reads Endroit chéri de Lise: Lise's favourite spot.

Antoine and Lise had barely a decade in the finished park; he died in 1803, she in 1805. The long chapter belonged to their daughter-in-law Martha de la Calmette, who lived here as a widow for fifty-seven years until her death in 1877 and made the place a fixture of the Danish Golden Age. The poet Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger came. So did the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. The visitor who mattered most arrived in the summer of 1829, aged twenty-four and not yet famous: Hans Christian Andersen, who found Liselund delightful. It stayed with him. His poem Klintekorset paa Møen — Møn's Cliff Cross — took its subject from the large wooden cross standing at the edge of the chalk. Liselund also credits the enormous hollow willow beside the Swiss House with seeding The Tinderbox, an attribution that rests on tradition rather than on anything Andersen wrote down.

In 1887 Baron Fritz Rosenkrantz built a larger, Italianate house on the western slope, Liselund Ny Slot, which is a hotel today and was sold in June 2025 to Frederik Nørgaard, a Dane returning after thirty years in San Francisco. But the estate's hardest years came under Baron Niels Rosenkranz, who led the West Møn resistance group — organised a week after the German occupation of 9 April 1940, possibly the first such group in Denmark. From late 1942 it began moving Jewish families out of Denmark to neutral Sweden, and the work intensified in October 1943 when the Germans set out to round up Denmark's Jews systematically. People were led at night down the treacherous paths from Liselund park to the beach below, where small boats waited. The Gestapo suspected the route. When they came on the night of 10 October 1943, the group had been warned, and they found no one. Rosenkranz was also central to the rescue of 351 Stutthof prisoners landed at Klintholm Havn on 5 May 1945. Rising maintenance costs eventually put the old thatched manor and its park into the hands of the Danish State, administered by the National Museum of Denmark.