Hotel Castello di Reschio, Umbria
An aristocratic family has transformed a medieval castle on an Umbrian estate into a sumptuous, welcoming hotel that revels in both its history and its setting.
Umbria is an unexpected place. It fulfils a lot of conventional Italian-idyll fantasies, with its picturesque rolling terrain – rougher and less administered-to than Tuscany’s, though similarly replete with hill towns of sombre travertine and faded brick, splashed with the crimson of cascading geraniums. But in Umbria there’s a subtle undertow of something almost mystical; a primacy and reverence for the natural world that permeates both history and culture, particularly in its central and northern reaches. It has been extolled through centuries, by figures as old as Saint Francis of Assisi (born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, a dissolute nobleman who eventually renounced all his worldly possessions in favour of a life spent communing with God between hermitages and forests), and as contemporary as Brunello Cuccinelli – raised in Castel Rigone, a tiny 15th-century hamlet outside Perugia, with no electricity or running water – but surrounded by the nature that ultimately shaped his vision of sustainable luxury.
This is the Umbria you enter when you turn west onto the SP146 highway, just above Umbertide, and wind your way along a sinuous two-lane trajectory towards the Reschio estate. The foundations of Reschio date back more than a thousand years: the first family deeds were granted by Charlemagne, and by the early 14th century it was a Holy Roman Imperial fiefdom at the centre of constant inter-ducal and -state conflicts, before then coming into the hands of the noble Bichi Ruspoli family, who harnessed its agricultural potential. From the road, the castle –tall, punctuated by narrow towers, its first stones laid in the year 1050 ACE – can be seen, perched atop a promontory. To the south, for miles, are rolling hills, the very occasional farmhouse or ruin peeking out from dense groves of holm oak. It’s a view that hasn’t changed much in 200 years, as elemental and sylvan as anything left in central Italy.
In 1984, Antonio Bolza, an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat who had made his name as a publisher, acquired a parcel of land here. There was next to nothing around it: the slumbering castle; the ruins of those houses – around 50 in number, most at least 200 years old, built by the tenant farmers who once worked the land; and, in the flats along the road, dilapidated old stables and drying warehouses surrounded by vivid green tobacco fields, dating from the estate’s past incarnation as a thriving tobacco farm.
Not many people would gaze on all this and divine the potential for one of Europe’s most exclusive residential developments. Bolza did, and along with his son, London-trained architect Benedikt Bolza, and Benedikt’s wife, the Florentine noblewoman Nencia Corsini, he set out to create just that, 10 years after staking his own personal claim.
Today Reschio is 3700 acres of restored and protected farm and woodland, offering a hospitality that’s unmatched in the region. Some 26 of the farmhouses have been carefully restored over the past two decades, all under the discerning eye of Benedikt, and sold to owners across the globe. They are lush oases adrift in seas of green, distinctive for their marriage of refined style and total privacy. The owners choose a ruin, then work with Bolza on bespoke interiors and furnishings, from sustainably harvested oak for floors and joinery, to locally produced textiles. Around a dozen of them are available for holiday rentals, offering every imaginable creature comfort: home cinemas; wine cellars; double-height chef’s kitchens; absurdly photogenic infinity pools, which set social media alight whenever they are circulated.
When owners commit to one of Reschio’s farmhouses, though, they’re not just investing in radiant underfloor heating and made-to-measure cabinetry. They also become part of a genuine preservation initiative, which comprises organic farming, sustainable landscape design, and wildlife management. The passion for the land shared by Bolza and Corsini, who took over management of the estate from Bolza’s father in 2000, is as much a cornerstone of the Reschio offering as are the bespoke interiors and concierge services its owners enjoy. Roads are still unpaved; wild boar and roe deer still have the run of the forests; alfalfa, knee-high in the spring, still ripples like sheets of silk in the gullies between wooded hills.
For years, while they laboured to bring their vision for Reschio to fruition, Bolza, Corsini and their four children lived in the castle. It was deeply romantic, if not always the pinnacle of modern convenience: drafts blew in from unseen crevices, and ceilings leaked, and some of the myriad staircases groaned ominously. Alongside the farmhouse restorations, other initiatives were under way: a stunning equestrian theatre, with indoor and outdoor training rings, was built, where Antonio Bolza, an accomplished dressage rider, puts his 40-odd Andalusian horses through their piaffes and flying changes (and where owners take private lessons, and in some cases board their own horses for a season). The old warehouses below the castle were converted into loft-like, industrial-chic offices for Bolza’s architecture and design firm. Work began on a restaurant, Alle Scuderie, which would serve as an estate gathering place; towering potted palms graze its soaring ceilings, and light spills across rosy brick floors and gleaming marble tables through 4m windows.
When their fifth child was born in 2015, Bolza and Corsini moved into one of the farmhouses up the hill. The castle wasn’t destined to remain empty for long, however. Expanding the Reschio experience had been on their minds for some time; and a perhaps inevitable idea of how to do it had already taken shape.
Hotel Castello di Reschio opened its doors to guests in May, five years and one pandemic later. It’s a testament in bricks and mortar – and sustainably farmed oak, and marble and turned wood and unpolished brass, and sumptuous heavy linens and velvets and silks – to Benedikt Bolza’s estimable talents as both architect and designer. Rooms and spaces that were sometimes dauntingly spare have been made comfortable, even cosy, with soft lighting and rich texture. Thirty of its suites are housed in the castle itself, its southern half curving in a graceful semicircle around a central courtyard, where cypresses and Calabrian pines cast a diffuse secondary architecture of light and shade. Another six are in the parish adjacent to the chapel just outside the castle walls, pared gorgeously back to its structural elements and washed in a delicate grey-toned pink.
I first checked in last autumn, invited by the Bolzas for a long-weekend preview of what Hotel Castello di Reschio would offer. Under uncertain skies, I was met by a staffer who opened my door with an umbrella at the ready and escorted me into the courtyard. On a flagstone patio a fire burned in a brazier, surrounded by elegant garden furniture and campaign chairs. In a boot room next to it, a larger fire crackled invitingly in a huge open fireplace; rows of wellies and umbrellas were assembled neatly on racks on one side, and plush armchairs, presumably for post-ramble toe-warming, on the other. A long refectory table was lined with piles and vases of wildflowers – a delightful impromptu still shot from the arranging labours of Corsini, who oversees all of Reschio’s gardens.
A slim bar attaches the boot room to the Palm Court, an extraordinary conservatory-like space, lush with hanging lanterns and more potted palms and groupings of rattan settees and chairs. A grand piano sits in front of the tall glass doors (later that weekend, we’d find ourselves gathered around it at midnight, being serenaded after a long, slightly rambunctious supper by a young family friend of the Bolzas’ who founded Florence’s New Generation Festival). This is the space where hotel guests sip and decompress post-arrival. It’s a witty fin-de-siècle flourish – what the Counts of Reschio might have done with the space, perhaps, had they still had the run of the estate at the time – and a window onto the whimsy that informed Bolza’s reimagination of the castle, and the whole Reschio experience, for this new breed of guest.
“This was a huge job for us, because for the first time we had to really invest in the estate,” says Bolza. “We were used to building houses for our clients, with their investment. It was daunting. But developing and giving the services we do to our owners over the years” – and the Bolzas do just about everything for them, from bill paying to tax declarations and provisioning of the pantries, and of course, villa and garden maintenance – “guided us in a way to what we’d do with this next stage.”
In the suites, Bolza has worked adeptly in the place where rigour and indulgence intersect. Walls are washed in unassuming earth tones, ceiling beams subtly waxed, floors clad in wide oak plank and brick. They’re then brought to life with jewel-toned textiles, richly patinated woods and stones, and a few strikes of design caprice engineered simply to delight. My own suite – larger than my flat in Rome – featured small libraries on shelves (among the books were blocks of reclaimed oak ends, their ‘spines’ painted with ornate titles by the Bolza children), a vivid tapestry with a family coat of arms hung behind my bed, and a smattering of vintage wood mannequins, standing like elegant sentinels (one of them handily conscripted as a holder for the kimono robe I threw on each morning). Above the open-plan changing area, a tiny staircase led to an elevated reading nook, with a chaise longue next to a small window giving onto a view of rippling hills that could have been painted by Lippi or Gozzoli 550 years ago (that I didn’t spend an entire morning curled up there with tea, a book and that view is an abiding regret). An enormous gilded altar, a family heirloom, presided over my dressing table: “We call your suite the ‘Uncle Pope’ suite,” Bolza told me with a smile – it was so christened when he and Corsini discovered that one of her princely ancestors, Pope Clement XII (born Lorenzo Corsini) had been the one to bestow the title of Counts of Reschio onto the Bichi Ruspoli family, into which a Corsini niece had married, in 1730.
The sublime is in such details throughout. In the suite next to the one I slept in, the bed is cloaked in an enormous white pavilion, reminiscent of a medieval pageant tent (and, it was unanimously agreed by my weekend companions and I, extremely sexy). The five-storey tower suite – its sitting room, complete with its original millstone, at ground level, and a bedroom and bath on each subsequent floor – ascends to a magical roof terrace with an alfresco claw-foot tub and 360 views over Reschio and north towards the Val Niccone. Sleek furniture designed by Bolza features prominently in every space, from the signature four-poster beds, lacquered in shades of saffron or carnelian or sage, to the brass and marble coffee tables and the handpainted cement-based reading lamps. (Much of it is now available for purchase, compiled in a line called BB for Reschio launched earlier this year.)
A short walk from the castle is the hotel’s pool – a vast semi-circular mirror of aquamarine, set flush into a lawn, reflecting a canvas of wide-open sky. The small tower next to it has been converted into a casual pool bar and lunch spot. A larger restaurant, on the castle’s first floor, serves breakfast and suppers across several interior spaces (including a beautifully reclaimed former kitchen with remnants of its hearth and staircase still present) and on an ample west-facing terrace. In the subterranean former wine cellars of the castle, Bolza and Corsini have installed what might be the apotheosis of all spas; called The Bathhouse, it consists of a salt-water Roman pool, a hammam and sauna, and a single, enormous treatment room under a vaulted stone ceiling.
So far, so doesn’t-miss-a-trick fabulous. But it seemed to me that where Bolza and Corsini have really hit their mark is in the intelligent subtlety with which Reschio itself – its forests and ruins, its stories, its history – is woven into the flow of hotel days and evenings. Starting with the food, which was superb throughout my long weekend in every manifestation, from the simple pleasure of made-to-order pizzas eaten alfresco (served with dried pepperoncini, each tiny plate of them graced with delicate scissors for snipping) to the refined suppers at Le Scuderie, where the estate’s own roe deer and boar feature in various moreish permutations alongside produce from Corsini’s gardens and orchards. With literally dozens of varieties of tomatoes, eggplants and peppers, as well as both medicinal and fragrant herbs, these absolutely merit a stroll-through, something Corsini encourages in her own company or that of one of her staff. Guided – or solo – hikes and cycling are similarly encouraged; likewise fishing, clay shooting and truffle hunts.
When the skies cleared late one morning, I piled into Corsini’s Land Cruiser with a passel of family dogs and we made for the estate’s far reaches. She had, she said, a tree she wanted to show me. We growled up muddy inclines in second gear, oak limbs scratching along our sides; we roared past recently tilled flats, destined for yet more herb and vegetable gardens. We saw no one else; here and there, I glimpsed Reschio houses, high atop hills. At a certain point she pulled off the road. Across a shallow valley stood a huge oak, its lower boughs reaching earthward in a near-perfect circle. We hopped out and walked to it through tall blond grasses, tiny silvered butterflies and fat bumblebees flitting around us. Stepping underneath it was like entering a cathedral. Corsini – a petite woman with vivid, assessing blue eyes and a measured way about her – smiled. The only sounds were the hum of the bees and the murmuring of the oak itself in the wind; between gently undulating branches flashed views of a landscape as old as the saints who once roamed it. This, she said, is where she comes to feel connected to Reschio; she considered it one of the estate’s most beautiful assets. The pleasures of the Hotel are, without question, a triumph; but it in the dancing green light under the oak, it was hard to disagree with her.
Reschio.com; rooms from €760
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