Category Archives: Villas

Timeless Chic at Clos Videlot

It seems that, in the world in which we live and orbit today, nearly every aesthetic image has been posted, pinned and uploaded into the ether. As a part-time blogger I often grow tired of rediscovering the same repeated information and imagery that can be found from the original source – accurately credited, I might […]

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A Man and His Houses, Part III

“October Hill” was collector and art patron Wright Ludington’s third and final home in Montecito. After moving to California in 1915 to attend the Tatcher School in Ojai he would make Montecito, California, his home, eventually inheriting his father’s Spanish-Colonial-style villa in 1926 at the age of 27, which he renamed Val Verde (see A […]

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Villa Tre Ville – Then and Now

The opening introduction on Villa Tre Ville’s website – the Amalfitani home of Franco Zeffirelli until 2009 – reads: At Villa Tre Ville, there has always been an atmosphere of art and culture. The property was bought around the 1920s by Mikhail Semenov, the Russian writer, who was the first to gather around him that […]

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A TALE OF TWO VILLAS

The Amalfi Coast may very well be my favorite destination. The winding, vertiginous coastline – defined by calcareous-dolomitic rock formations – plunges into the Tyrranean Sea, creating a dramatic landscape  spotted with mountain-hugging towns and sun-kissed dwellings. The air, scented with lemon (an Amalfitani staple), Mediterranean scrub, local herbs, and the sea mix to produce […]

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Up at the Villa

Posted June 4, 2014. Filed in Italian Country Houses, Villas

In an article written by Marella Caracciolo Chia titled “La Dolce Vita”, in the May issue of Architectural Digest, Caracciolo Chia shed further light on two villas – one imagined, the other real – that I particularly fancy: the imagined villa from the 2002 movie adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s novel Up at the Villa and, […]

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Villa la Rose

Posted October 12, 2013. Filed in Italian Country Houses, Tuscan Style, Villas

My survey of Tuscan-style architecture and interiors, beginning with Under the Tuscan Sun, continues into the hills above southern Florence. The 15th-century Villa delle Rose, an example of the classical Tuscan villa modeled after Villa Medici in Fiesole, was saved from obscurity by Ernest Boissevain and his wife Jean Tennyson, the famous opera singer, when […]

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Riviera Style: Villa Nara Mondadori

Posted September 9, 2013. Filed in Moderne, Peter Marino, Riviera Style, Villas

Villa Nara Mondadori was designed and constructed by architect Oscar Niemeyer on Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in 1968, a Modernist anomaly amidst Belle Époque mansions peppered up and down the Côte d’Azur. But it no less signifies a taste for luxury by the monied set than does its extroverted, elaborate and highly stylized neighboring pink and ocher manses. […]

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Riviera Style: Villa Corinne

Konstantin and Natasha Kagalovsky had set their eyes for some time on the blush pink Belle Époque era villa next door to their own, Villa Mona – a golden-ocher villa built in 1902 with access to a private beach – on Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.  “We were thinking how nice it would be if one day we could join […]

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