One morning last spring, my aunt Marella Agnelli woke early at her home in the Northern Italian city of Turin and announced that she and I would spend the day at Villar Perosa, the Agnelli estate some 40 miles to the west. Eager to see its gardens, my father’s sister proposed that we have lunch beside the swimming pool there and return before dusk. We had been working solidly for the past week, putting the final touches on Marella Agnelli: The Last Swan, our book about her life as a style icon, photographer, textile designer, and inspired amateur decorator and gardener (to be published by Rizzoli in October), so the outing was a welcome break.
On the way she sat next to the driver, with her dogs—Chico, a Chihuahua, and a Shiba Inu called, simply enough, Shiba—on her lap, and reminisced about her first visit to Villar. It was September 1953, and the occasion was the wedding of her friend Maria Sole Agnelli to Count Ranieri Campello della Spina. That same evening my aunt (then Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto) and the bride’s eldest brother, Gianni, announced their engagement. Having recently returned to Italy after spending 18 months in New York City assisting fashion photographer Erwin Blumenfeld, Marella was bewitched by the pre–World War I atmosphere of the Agnellis’ house. "There was this sense of being in an enchanted time warp," she said, recalling how a housemaid in an apron that nearly reached the floor brought her breakfast in bed on a silver tray. "Villar was an old family home full of charm and nostalgia."
More than six decades later, that atmosphere of timelessness still hovers over this beloved retreat, where eight generations (and counting) of Agnellis have arrived with children and dogs in tow. Within view of the French Alps, the 18th-century former hunting lodge attributed to architect Filippo Juvarra is a graceful essay in Piedmontese Baroque. According to Gianni, who inherited it in the 1940s and died in 2003, his ancestor Giuseppe Agnelli, a Napoleonic officer, acquired the estate in the early 19th century and planted mulberry trees for raising silkworms. That investment gave rise to a fortune that, in 1899, helped launch Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili Torino, a.k.a. Fiat, Italy’s largest automotive company, where Gianni served as chairman for 30 years.
By the time my aunt and Gianni married, the classical decorator Stephane Boudin had already restored a portion of the house damaged by bombing in World War II, and he continued to assist the newlyweds. Marella and the puckish Parisian collaborated with purposeful sensitivity. Gianni’s parents and grandparents had died when he was young, leaving behind rooms furnished with memories, so his bride, the daughter of a Neapolitan prince and a mother from Peoria, Illinois, was determined to tread softly.
Boudin and Marella refreshed the piano nobile’s famous gallery, where exuberant stuccowork frames 18th-century Chinese export wallpaper and garlands the ceiling. They upholstered the villa’s antique Piedmontese chairs and settees—painted in pale, pretty colors that bring to mind macarons—in bold French velvets and Italian silks, and made-to-measure sofas added modern comfort. Alongside the main dining room, they set up a cozy library for after-dinner coffee. A few guest rooms became perfect expressions of ancien régime French taste, the decorator’s specialty. Boudin’s friend Russell Page, the British garden genius, helped Marella clarify the landscape, which she described as having been "a patchwork, each area created by a different generation."
Her increasing confidence as a gardener led her back inside the house, where she began dressing some spaces in a less formal, more familial mode. (Her son, Edoardo, was born in 1954 and her daughter, Margherita, a year later.) With wicker furniture cushioned in bright patterns and finely woven straw matting on the floor, the so-called garden room marks the moment when Marella left behind Boudin’s historicism in favor of her own simpler, contemporary taste. Unlined taffeta curtains with softly ruffled hems became part of her vocabulary, as did cheerful printed fabrics—she even designed an award-winning textile collection in the ’70s.
Then, 30 years ago, the frequent presence of eight lively grandchildren prompted Marella to transform a portion of the top floor into a private sanctuary. Following the advice of an old friend, decorator Federico Forquet, she fashioned four bedrooms. Among them is her intimate, low-ceilinged suite, lavished from walls to lampshades with a peony pattern. Another is Gianni’s barrel-vaulted chamber, where she curtained the imposing canopy bed with mismatched chintzes—one a dramatic Indian-style floral, the other dappled with white roses like those that bloom outside the arched window.
Anyone who has spent time at Villar joins in the Agnelli traditions. Morning hikes in the foothills of the Alps are typically followed by chess and Scrabble in the garden room. European newspapers are stacked in strategic spots, and books in Italian, French, and English are arranged in baskets on a large table, ready for perusal. There has also been, as long as I can remember, a card table set with a 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzle that takes family and friends an entire month to complete. In hot weather everyone decamps to the swimming pool and the adjacent wood pavilion—as spare as a Zen temple—by architect Gae Aulenti. Landscape designer Paolo Pejrone, a Page disciple, has banked this section with purple heather punctuated by ‘Iceberg’ roses and boxwood clipped into corkscrews and spheres. It is a destination cherished by all, from oldest to youngest, a success that is proof of my aunt’s attention to detail.
"Every time I create a home or a garden, I ask myself the same questions," Marella said as we sat beside the pool, our lunch finished and the sun setting. "Where will we gather together in the daytime and in the evening? How can I preserve a few quiet, secluded spots for reading or working? Which is the coolest area in the garden for meals in the shade? Architecture and landscapes influence our lives so much—I’m always fascinated by that."
Tour the magnificent interiors and grounds of the historic Villar Perosa.
