![]() In what the hotel calls her “witch’s brew house,” she mixes natural pigments for the hotel’s subdued and textured walls. Nencia has decorated the rooms and nooks and everything else with an Eden of foraged flowers that she and the staff hang to dry in the old boot room. My wife sniffed them for lavender I bounced them on my shoulders-they held rolled up tub mats. They drip with Bolza’s maximalist Old World, Grand Hotel, steampunk brass-meets-wood style and are so rich in cozy details that we puzzled over what indulgence lay hidden in two cloth bags in the bathroom. The 36 unique rooms and suites (including six suites in a former vestry across a courtyard) form an opulent oasis in the rustic Umbrian countryside. She keeps her paint brushes and tools in a studio on the mezzanine. After designing so many houses for others, Bolza says the hotel restoration posed the challenge of “designing for myself,” because he “wanted it to be sort of as if we had never left. Coming back from the Bolzas’ new barn to their former home in the castle, where they lived for 11 years, underlines their comprehensive approach to the good life. Bolza teases them back, saying that the door he put under a portrait of Clement XII, the Corsini pope who was his wife’s ancestor, is meant to give easy access to a lawn filled with tents “for the weddings.” Time passes and the ribbing subsides and Giorgiana, 21, looks around and says, “I can’t remember how we used to live before we had this.” The girls imbue the space with gregarious, Little Women in Umbria banter, absentmindedly unscrewing their father’s lamps and teasing him for building a pool only after they moved out (“Everything he does,” says Olimpia, 16, “is for himself”). “The pot is too small, darling,” says Nencia, who also wears a brimmed hat adorned with quills. “What happened here, darling?” asks Bolza, who wears a brimmed hat adorned with quills, about a toppled plant in the barn studio. Guest entertainers bang out showstoppers on the barn’s black piano, and friends, the girls say, come over to dance flamenco and tango and rock ’n’ roll. “Probably a cardinal will get murdered,” quips Vita, 19. “Cheat.”), rehearse Reschio’s annual mystery musical review here. The Bolza children, four girls and a boy, and cousins from the couple’s large families, including the six children of Nencia’s twin sister in Florence (“She has twins,” Nencia notes. In the barn, a portrait of Nencia at 16, by the British artist Richard Foster. “I want it to be more jungle,” Bolza says, explaining that he intends to add more plants for the summer, when he will open the glass wall, which will allow birds to fly in and bathers to swim out onto the property. And behind this door a steam room and an indoor/outdoor pool that looks like a liquid corridor shimmering in the day’s fading light. There are dried yellow yarrow flowers in amber apothecary jars over here, a portrait of Nencia as a teenager and later with child over there. A ring of artichoke plants and pink sundowns borders the barn. Daybeds upholstered in stripes or houndstooth or floral patterns sit below busts and cherished Poggibonsi lamps from Bolza’s furniture line, B.B. Sliding glass doors brighten the warm charcoal-colored walls, which looked, before Nencia suggested more black paint, like “purple yogurt,” as Bolza puts it. Cyrill Matterīuilt on the site of an old washhouse and tobacco drying tower, the barn has a tall steel-frame pine roof slitted with skylights. The custom sofa is flanked by velvet Poggibonsi floor lamps from Benedikt’s line B.B. In the barn’s main room a salvaged wood stove from northern Italy overlooks an antique daybed and a Fratelli Reguitti campaign chair.
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