For design
Castello di Reschio
Niccone Valley · Umbria, Italy
Where Umbria runs into Tuscany, a castle sits on a hill above 1,500 hectares of its own land. Its walls go back a thousand years, to around 1050, and for most of the last three decades the Bolza family have been quietly putting it back together. The architect of that work, Count Benedikt Bolza, drew almost everything you touch here, from the plan of the rooms to the handles on the doors, and the result opened as a hotel only in 2021. There are 36 rooms and suites and no two are the same, each one shaped by the old walls rather than forced into line by them. You will not find a television in any of them, which tells you what kind of quiet the place keeps.
Two kitchens carry the estate. Ristorante al Castello is the formal one, held inside the castle with a terrace that faces the sunset, and it cooks with the restraint a building like this asks for. Down among the old stables, Ristorante alle Scuderie keeps longer hours under high ceilings and out in the garden, with live music some evenings and a menu that follows the season. Much of what reaches the table is grown on the estate, in the kitchen gardens and groves that also give the oil and the wine. For a drink there is the Palm Court Bar in the castle courtyard, and by the pool the Bar Torrino runs through the day.
Plenty of grand houses have been turned into hotels. Few feel this considered, or this personal. Reschio is one family's long argument that a place like this should be restored slowly and lived in rather than gutted and rebranded, and it holds that line down to the furniture, most of which is made on site. The Bathhouse spa sits in the castle's vaulted wine cellars, there are horses and a riding school, and the land itself, oak woods and farmland, is the reason to stay put rather than tour. It is expensive and it is remote, and both of those are the point. Come for the design and the silence, and give it more than a night.
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