JOHN PHILLIPS spent more than two years looking for a villa in Italy
before he saw Borgo Finocchieto near this town in Tuscany. He had always
imagined having a place in Italy — his original family name was
Filippi, and he had fallen hard for the country in 1969, after a lonely
tour of Eastern Europe. What he had never imagined, until that day in
the fall of 2000, was that that place would be a village.
A tiny medieval farming town, Borgo Finocchieto (the name means village
of fennel fields) was little more than ruins and piles of dirt when
he first came here. He had been sent by a friend proposing a joint purchase:
Mr. Phillips, a Washington lawyer, would buy the main house and the
friend and two others would buy the rest. The Borgo’s five acres
and five dilapidated structures were part of an estate once owned by
the Borghese family, and overlooked a valley of hills and vineyards.
Mr. Phillips said he was instantly struck by the view, uninterrupted
and virtually unchanged for 1,000 years, and by the silence: the site
was the quietest he had visited in Italy.
The Borgo, which appears on a map from 1318, is about 40 miles south
of Siena, close to the ancient Florence-Rome road used by Chaucer and
Michelangelo. It was farmed by peasants and sharecroppers. As late as
the 1960s, 21 families shared the Borgo’s large U-shaped manor
house, living on the second floor without indoor plumbing and keeping
their livestock sheltered beneath them on the ground level. When Mr.
Phillips saw it, the village’s onetime chapel had become a barn,
and an ugly tractor shed blighted the view of the countryside.
Mr. Phillips decided the Borgo should be brought back to life as a
single entity, and in 2001 he bought it himself in what he called “a
moment of irrational exuberance.”
Mr. Phillips, now 64, could afford to buy and renovate the Borgo after
decades as a public interest lawyer, during which he earned cuts of
the considerable money that he helped recover for the California and
federal governments from contractors accused of corruption.
But he wondered whether he and his wife, Linda Douglass, then a correspondent
for ABC News, really had a use for so many houses in the Italian countryside
— even given their large extended family and network of friends.
He decided that the Borgo should double as a gathering place for “people
associated with charitable and educational issues.” Its beauty
and history could help inspire creative thought and dialogue, he hoped;
it would be nice, he joked, “to have the Mideast peace talks here.”
(He would charge for these gatherings, he said, but was not interested
in making a profit; he has also considered renting the Borgo out to
select business groups to help finance the plan.)
But before Mr. Phillips could remake the Borgo, he had to face the
formidable hurdle of the Italian government’s historic preservation
entities, which had declared it a “place of special significance.”
He shrewdly hired Amalia Agnelli, a former head of the preservation
committee here in Buonconvento, as his architect. Even so, two years
of planning were required before construction could begin.
“Rebuilding was expected to be totally consistent with what was
there before,” said Mr. Phillips. “If there was a window
300 years ago that had been covered up, you could put the window back,
but you could not add a new window.”
In Italy, there are records dating back centuries that detail the exact
size and shape of many buildings, and even the materials used for the
original interiors. There were approximately 30,000 square feet to reconstruct,
including the manor house, the barn (which would become a five-bedroom
house), the chapel (four bedrooms) and two two-bedroom cottages, for
a total of 22 bedrooms that could sleep 46 — and all of it had
to fit within the buildings’ original volumes.
Nearly four years later, the project is only now being finished. Mr.
Phillips estimated its value at about $30 million, thanks largely to
the Tuscan real estate boom of the last few years and the strength of
the euro, although his own costs were probably less than a third of
that.
Since he could not be around to supervise his ambitious plan on a daily
or even monthly basis, Mr. Phillips assembled a team of friends and
friends of friends, many of them British and American expatriates who
had retired to Tuscany and spoke at least some Italian. One of the group’s
first decisions was to use only local materials, artisans and labor,
for authenticity.
“There was not going to be a single thing here that has been
brought over from the United States,” said Karen Hartmann, a former
Boston kitchen designer who became the Borgo’s decorator.The manor
house, with its original stone staircase leading to a long corridor
entryway, would have suites for both the Phillips family and the family
of Mr. Phillips’s law partner, Mary Louise Cohen, who now visit
frequently. There would be nine other bedrooms, a formal living room,
two large dining rooms, a modern kitchen that could be used to prepare
meals for 100, a ballroom-conference room and a bar, library and wine
cellar with an antique grape press.
Mr. Phillips also requested some very unBorgo-like features, including
a gym and an 18-car garage that Ms. Agnelli buried under the lawn, a
pool, and a tennis court that the preservation committee allowed her
to build in place of the tractor shed.
Mrs. Hartmann, meanwhile, traveled twice a month to the antiques markets
in Lucca and Arezzo, getting to know dealers of 18th-, 19th- and early
20th-century antiques and their sources for restoration. She found the
large marble-topped credenza which sits at the top of the stone stairs
in the manor house at a wine festival in Buonconvento. For coffee tables,
she bought small tables of dining height and had them cut down. She
wanted a farmhouse style for the interiors featuring colors and tiles
that were traditionally rustic but could still be elegant. Most of the
walls were stuccoed in traditional ochre or terra cotta. In the manor
house the antique white walls of the original dining room featured a
stenciled design around the ceiling molding that had been in the house
for several hundred years, which Mrs. Hartmann copied in the new dining
room. She also bought copies of antiques.
“These were going to be pieces that were going to be touched,
handled and sat on — they can’t be precious,” she
said. “We’re in the country. That’s really the message
here.”
She hired former blacksmiths in Buonconvento to do ironwork, and other
craftsmen from nearby towns — a woodworker in Sinalunga who could
fashion intricately inlaid tables, a family in Poggibonsi that made
and hand-painted copies of antique wooden headboards. The only items
not from Tuscany were the handmade ceramics from Amalfi.
Mrs. Hartmann planned far in advance so as not to overwhelm vendors
like her Siena upholsterer, who did not have the space to work on 10
sofas at a time. She found that efforts at bargaining rarely paid off.
“They don’t sit there and calculate how much you are going
to spend,” she said of the local business people. “They
set a price. They are much more responsive if you are appreciative of
their work and time and respect how many years and generations and families
are involved,” she added. “It is very important to have
conversations with them.”
Mr. Phillips also did well in hiring a local chef, Luigi Ricci, who
as it happened had just retired to the next-door village of Bibbiano
after 30 years of working for Paul Bocuse in Lyon. Because turkey is
scarce in the area, Mr. Ricci prepared veal when Mr. Phillips brought
his extended family to the Borgo last Thanksgiving. But more recently,
Mr. Ricci learned that a neighbor was raising a turkey. After a month
of plying the neighbor with his desserts, he produced the bird as part
of a New Year’s Eve dinner in the manor house’s formal dining
room.
