Tuscan Villa

There's no more romantic or perfect location for any house in Italy to my mind than in t It's a project that's evolved for 17 years and every year there's been a different focus and a different little area created. T It's a lovely estate. The house is sitting in a beautiful area of Tuscany. It's an old estate that was wedged between two fantastic vineyards and has olive groves and lavender and is sort of a little bit of heaven. It just lacked any kind of entrance. As you turn up the drive leading away from the vineyards, you go through some lovely big metal gates and then you sweep into your own drive and your own drive is the trees on your left hand side are these very beautifully manicured cypress trees and they're almost And as you come up to the house you then start to see the house on your right hand side. We've taken away some of the trees that block the view so that you get the full extent of the courtyard. As you sweep into it in front of you have t And in front of you is the house and on either side of you are the guest houses and the sort of mixture of the three houses creates the illusion, the atmosphere of quite a large house but never any space in itself is overly grand. I mean it's the most beautiful entrance sequence that you could conceive. Having a lovely tusk in this date of course it has to have and getting hot in the s It needs to have a lovely swimming pool. What were able to do is to redefine the route down to the pool. We planted cypress trees that would frame the house and you'd carry down to the tall, beautifully, beautifully maintained hedges that would surround the pool and then you get down to the pool itself w And it makes the whole view down over the pool into a sort of series again, a series of episodes and I t You want to be able to make sure that there are features of interest at each stage. The the cutting garden existed but you never went into it. The rose garden existed but unless you were the gardener you never went into it. The herb garden existed but We made sure that the route to the tennis court took you through there. So you have t You want that to be a bit of an exploration, a bit of a journey. So you start walking down the pergola and then the pergola curves to the right and then on the right hand side there are swathes of Mediterranean plants and then you curve your way around and eventually you reach down to the tennis court but it's been a journey. We've experienced a lot of the garden that way and that was very important to me. The project's taken a lot of time, I t In the basement we created a wonderful cinema room, a cinema and bar, rather glamorous cinema. I kind of wanted to make it slightly bit 1920s, a bit heyday of black and w Very important to me that the sound in the gym doesn't feel echoey so I created panels with sycamore and fabric that absorb the sound so that when you're working out there you've got a beautiful sound system of course but when you're working out there you don't feel in a hollow box. We made a beautiful spa another time with leather lined walls, dark romantic, founded way of lighting the shelves so that only the shelves need to be lit. But then there were lots of other rooms, we designed two guest houses or the two guest houses that were either side, it used to be for the staff and the housekeeper and the cook but we needed more bedrooms and so we then turned both of them into these rather very special areas that feel linked in atmosphere to the main house but they are simpler, they have a slightly more informal nature, lots of w The garage is great because you can store everything you want down there and then you sweep out of the garage into your estate but very importantly we tried never to allow that access to be seen from the house so it's a very, it'sheltered by growths and by vines and by wonderfully blowy flower beds that mean that the access is never anything that becomes Ah, isn'that beautiful?