A Tuscan Adventure | Charlotte Horton
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Intro: Welcome to the one and only interior design book podcast, Decorating by the Book Podcast by Suzy Chase from her dining room table in New York City. Join Suzy for conversations about the latest and greatest interior design books with the authors who wrote them.
Charlotte Horton: Hello or Buongiorno, everyone. My name is Charlotte Horton, and I have just written a book called Castello Di Potentino: A Tuscan Adventure The Restoration of a Castle published by Rizzoli.
Suzy Chase: So let's start at the beginning.
Charlotte Horton: Yeah.
Suzy Chase: And I am so curious to know how an English family ended up in Tuscany.
Charlotte Horton: My grandmother, who was a very interesting woman. She was an heiress, she did have quite a lot of money and that gave her a certain independence. She came from the banking side of the Guinness family and there were three daughters. So essentially the wonderful patriarchal, leaving everything to the son didn't really happen. So she grew up as a quite independent thinking woman. She married very young to Sir Hugh Greene, who was the writer, Graham Greene's brother. And she married when she was 16 and he was then the Telegraphs correspondent to Berlin just before the second world war.
Charlotte Horton: So she had a very interesting life. She divorced him very early on. He was a fascinating man. He later became chairman of the BBC and he was probably a spy at that time in Berlin as well. But she then kind of went her own way and she became a literary agent and she was one of the very first female literary agents. She was engaged to marry Raymond Chandler, the noir detective writer, who did all the sort of Humphrey Bogart, private detective stories. But he died and she then really started concentrating more as a literary agent and decided to launch a series of travel books of places that people normally didn't go to like Sardinia and Corsica and the Aeolian Islands and Elba and Crete and some of the Greek islands.
Charlotte Horton: And she was on one of these research trip and I think it was Crete. She was waiting at a bus stop to get a bus into town and there was a woman waiting at the bus stop too and she started chatting to her. During this conversation waiting for the bus, they were chatting about what they were doing there and my grandmother said she was doing research for a series of travel books, but that she wanted to also find a house for her retirement, with her second husband.
Charlotte Horton: And this woman said, "Oh, you don't want to get something in the Greek islands. Everyone's buying houses on the Greek islands. You should go to this place, southern Tuscany called the Mount Amiata. It's between Pisa and Rome. Nobody's there. It's absolutely stunning. You've got the Mediterranean, you've got Italian culture, you're in Tuscany." And my grandmother didn't really take much notice. On her return to Great Britain she found that there telegram from this woman saying, "I've put a deposit down on a house for you in the Tuscan Mount Amiata." And my grandmother was so surprised at this that she thought, well, let's go and have a look. Why not? Let's have an adventure.
Charlotte Horton: So she went and fell in love with this house. And that house was really the beginning of experience and our love of this particular area of Southern Tuscany, which is in the province of Grosseto. That house she got in the early seventies so we were holidaying and spending as much time as possible as we could in Italy. I kind of, from the age of eight or so, was exposed to delights of Italian life.
Suzy Chase: She had such a zest for life and reading about her, I feel like you take after her.
Charlotte Horton: Well, funny enough, it's not a blood relation. She's my step-grandmother.
Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh.
Charlotte Horton: To be fair. So it's probably nurture, not nature. My family is full of steps. Someone said that I didn't have a family, I had a ladder because there were so many steps. Another thing that we're very good at is remarrying and divorcing and well, actually I haven't married at all, but that's probably because there were so many divorces in the family. My mother who grew up in one of the oldest and continuously inhabited houses in kent in Great Britain, loved funny old places. They didn't have to be castles. They didn't have to be villas.
Charlotte Horton: This extraordinary fated cottage in Wilshire in Great Britain, years ago, which had no electricity, in the middle of a whole load of bridle paths. You could ride for a whole day without meeting a tarmac road. We stayed there with little oil lamps and a fire and it was basically camping, but it was absolutely idyllic. So she had this great ability to spot these places that had some, not only charm and beauty, but some spirit, something about them, always in the midst of nature.
Charlotte Horton: And I think that's influenced me a lot. She was obviously involved in all of the crazy choices of buying castles and restoring castles. I think a lot of this is actually about women. Yes. I think it is about women's choices and the way that women would like to live and kind of the love and respect they have for nature and culture. So a very nurturing approach.
Suzy Chase: So in your early twenties, you started to chase your castle fantasy as you call it, and that kicked off with castle one in the summer of 1989. You and your friends set up home in a castle and which was like, essentially camping and I'd love to hear about that.
Charlotte Horton: So that really was a 20 year old's dream to go and camp in a ruined renaissance castle. It was really good fun. We had to put together old beds and beat out mattresses and chase out the rats. There was one bathroom that sort of worked. There was a little bit of a dribble of water that came out of a tap. Each cooking by gas. So it was a wonderful, simple way of living. The weather was absolutely stunning of course, because it was summer so we weren't too cold. That really, I have to say, was everyone's Tuscan fantasy holiday.
Charlotte Horton: It lasted about two to three months. And I think it was that period that really made me decide to leave London. After that we started on the restoration of that castle so it was builders and cranes, et cetera. So I moved into the only available accommodation, which was a ruined farmhouse above the cow shed. I lived with the cows who at night would be put inside into the shed under and I lived on top of the shed in a very simple farm worker's house, which was without electricity and had no windows.
Charlotte Horton: I obviously lived by candlelight and that was also great fun because the cows would pee at night and they would make the most incredible peeing sound below me, which was kind of very, I don't know, it was quite reassuring in a funny way. It would be this wonderful peeing concert, would sort of go on at night and it, funny enough, with a little bit of lowing and movement and crunching of hay, it felt very soothing. Almost sort of biblical actually, I was sleeping above a manger. So every day was a bit like a sort of nativity scene. I suppose it was almost a bit monastic.
Charlotte Horton: I left London and all my friends and having been a sort of good time, London freelance journalist, going to lots of parties and sort of living an urban life. For me to suddenly immerse myself with no telephone because you didn't have portable telephones in those days and nothing really. I absolutely loved it. And that was part also of what has gone into these restorations and this way of life is reassessing one's prior and values about what is important and what you actually really need in life. That was quite an extreme, but it laid the foundations for also me being able to do what I had to then do, which was to also being at ease with yourself in this beautiful rural situation.
Suzy Chase: So moving on to the mid 1990s, you were doing research in the London library and came across a picture of Castello di Potentino, in a book. What intrigued you about this castle?
Charlotte Horton: It was very mysterious. It was sort of shrouded in clouds. It was an old photograph and it was completely encased in ivy and trees and rose bushes, and it actually almost looked a bit Japanese. It looked a bit like a sort of a remote Shangri La, samurai castle in Tuscany up in the mountains, because it was a little bit further up the mountain from castle number one. I said, I never did know there was this mysterious place up there and it immediately attracted me also because of its name.
Charlotte Horton: Potentino means little strong one or little potent one. And I was like, what a great name. At castle number one, we would have all sorts of very interesting prestigious guests because my stepfather at that time was chairman of the British Museum. And so we would often have guests who had interest in architecture or archeology or art in some way. So I would arrange little trips for us to go off and see things of interest in the area. Of course, one day I decided that we should go to try and find this Castello di Potentino.
Charlotte Horton: So we all bundled into the car and went trailing off, got lost, couldn't find it and then eventually we managed to locate it down a very bumpy track, and it really was like the beauty and the beast. It had this air of sad neglect that it was really just looking for someone to come and bring it back to life. We were with a very well known art historian called Sir John Hale, who was an expert in Renaissance fortifications and the Renaissance in general. And he had, very sadly had a stroke, so he couldn't really talk, but what he did do, and I will never forget this, is that he mimed his sense of wonder and amazement at what an extraordinary building this was.
Charlotte Horton: It was without words, he just looked at me and he did this beautiful mime of awe and amazement and magic. Left and went to the local bar to have a coffee or something and of course discovered that it was for sale, for a lot of owners. At that time we weren't actually considering selling castle number one, but it always stuck in my brain that, so when we did decide to sell castle number one, everyone was like, well, where should we go then? What should we do? We've got all this furniture. What should we do? And I said, well, why don't we try and buy that other ruined castle?
Charlotte Horton: So my very mad and enthusiastic family were like, "Oh, okay, well yes. Why not? Let's let's have a look at it." So it really was a very strange role of the dice, the whole thing. So perhaps it was destiny, who knows?
Suzy Chase: Now, is it true that there were 24 different owners and you had to negotiate with them?
Charlotte Horton: Yes. We got everyone together. But getting two Italians to agree to something is extremely difficult. For getting 24 is, was quite something. So it was a lot of negotiation, a lot of sitting down, a lot of convincing, a lot of getting these people to understand that we were going to buy it and we had the money. But then they all started bickering and fighting about how much each little parcel of the castle that they owned was worth and whether, because one had fireplace in it, it was worth more than the other one.
Charlotte Horton: So all of this took a very long time to untangle, but we were dedicating so a lot of people say, how did you do that? And that's because me and my mother, we were dedicating our time to pushing this through and would talk to people individually. It was touch and go very exciting.
Suzy Chase: Well, as exciting as that was for me reading the rundown of the state of the castle was a bit overwhelming. Could you talk a little bit about the windows, doors and the water?
Charlotte Horton: There was no water. There were no bathrooms. There was a hole, a sort of medieval hole in one of the towers and there was no electricity. All the windows were broken. All the doors were broken. Anything that was of any value had been stolen or removed. The rooms were full of rubbish because nobody took rubbish away in those days. I think what people did is that they just found an empty room and put rubbish in the empty room. The castle just began to fill up until there really were no empty rooms to leave rubbish.
Charlotte Horton: There were bottles and old mattresses and old books but luckily there weren't any rats because there was no food and the rats had gone away because there was absolutely nothing for them to eat. What was wonderful was there were a lot of swallow nests, because the swallows had really used it as a sort of hotel because all the windows were open. So there were a lot of swallows nests, owls, birds, everything. It took us, I think, about two to three weeks with eight men to clean out the rubbish before we could even see exactly what we needed to do. It was a long process. And then we sold the other castle and we suddenly had a whole castle full of furniture.
Suzy Chase: So bit by bit, you recovered each room, painted and decorated it, saving as much of the colors and designs you found. Was there ever a time when you thought, oh my goodness, this is too daunting. This is impossible.
Charlotte Horton: There were moments when I couldn't stop. I'm a bit of an obsessive. I like to achieve and finish things so I can move on to the next thing. I didn't have that idea. I was so driven by this vision to see the castle come back to life. No, there was never a dull moment. There were struggles and there were moments that things were difficult, but never a moment where I felt like giving up.
Suzy Chase: You described this castle as ancient, but at the same time, modern and forward thinking. How so?
Charlotte Horton: Places like this, it's just a continuum, really. They exist in the past and if you bring them back to life, they exist in the future and they have a purpose for us now. That's why I think it's also modern. So we do lot of things here that, we call it the 21st century castle, because we obviously do a lot of work here with guests and hosting things and concerts, and we've done contemporary music here and we've had contemporary artists here. We had a contemporary poet here writing about the castle. We published some books. We got little printing press, the Potentino Press. We do obviously, sell our wine and our gin and our vermouth and now we are doing honey and we've got olive oil.
Charlotte Horton: We're about to start an archeological and botanical survey of the valley with some universities. We're going to have 16 students and eight professors here in the summer. We've also got some taxonomists coming to look at biodiversity in the valley. There's always something that we're up to and looking to push forward our horizons all the time.
Suzy Chase: I'd love to chat about the grand dining room on page 96. There's a 20 foot dining room table and plates on the wall and I think I've heard you say that you were inspired by the movie, The Leopard.
Charlotte Horton: Yes. I love Visconti as a director. He captures these ex extraordinary pivotal moments in history and obviously The Leopard is one of his great films. But he also had this incredible eye for detail and not only detail in dress, in manners, but in interiors, and all of his details are absolutely perfect. He apparently, when making his films in the sets, which were often in old palaces and castles, which belonged to the old Italian noble families, he used them to make the films, so the interiors are all pretty authentic.
Charlotte Horton: But when creating a set, he would make sure that even the drawers had period objects or clothes or gloves or fans or whatever, in them. I was looking at The Leopard and our dining room has vaulted ceilings so we couldn't really put any paintings or anything framed on the walls because it wouldn't work. And they were a bit sort of white and bare. It was a rather large expanse. I was kind of racking my brain thinking, what could we put here? I noticed at the great scene in Prince's dining room, that the candle sconces are all surrounded with wonderful old plates. I went, there we go.
Charlotte Horton: We had cupboards full of incomplete, but beautiful sets of porcelain, and I was like, there we go. Bring them back to life, let everyone enjoy them. It did take a rather long time hanging all of them though. Getting it all right and drilling holes and putting them into plate holders and getting them up there. But we keep adding to it, which is fun. I think I've now exhausted our supply of old plates.
Suzy Chase: And on the ceiling you have the most gorgeous Zodiac painting.
Charlotte Horton: Most palaces and castles, even since Babylonian times, but certainly through the Roman period and up to the Renaissance, all had cosmological ceilings in them. There's some very famous ones, including the one in Caprarola, which is an extraordinary Renaissance palace. I was chatting with a friend who's an artist and we were like, what should we do there? I said, "Why don't we do a cosmological ceiling?"
Charlotte Horton: We both got very excited about this idea and did lots of research. And I was like, well, we probably need to do something not as heavy and as detailed as some of these Renaissance ceilings, let's do something a little bit more influenced by Cocteau and Matisse. We did a slightly more modern version of a cosmological ceiling with some funny little jokes and little references to things that have to do with our lives or have to do with the castle and things that happen here, which is traditional also in a cosmological ceiling. They used to make little jokes in them, witty little jokes. There are a few little jokes.
Charlotte Horton: There is a prize to be given to anyone who gets exactly the right date when the stars are like that above the castle. So it's also a little bit of a puzzle.
Suzy Chase: So on page 86, the chapel caught my eye with its fruit garlands and colorful cherubs. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Charlotte Horton: We did decide to, really try to leave the chapel as it had had, more or less been. But the altar had been painted, probably in the 1950s or 60s, in rather bright techni color. Colors which were a bit garish, let's say. The fruit was sort of bright orange and bright green and bright blue and the little cherubs had quite sort of, rouged cheeks and things and little golden curls. An art historian restorer friend of mine who restored it very delicately back to the, probably the original sort of, ivory bone color. You can really see the quality of the plaster work.
Suzy Chase: Another room I love, well, I love them all, is your white sitting room and you have a magnificent Chinoiserie piece. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Charlotte Horton: So the Chinoiserie piece came from the Guinness family and it's was made in Dublin and it's always been in the family. It's rather sort of whimsical, I suppose. I like it because it's very whimsical. All of it's, it's got little sort of dangly Chinese bits on it. And if you walk across the room, it all wobbles and it's perfect display place for some of the better porcelain that we have. But there's something a bit sort of theatrical about it. That's why I really enjoy that piece and it's beautifully made. The craftsmanship is extraordinary.
Suzy Chase: So there's a line in the book that I just love and you wrote, "Places can take over destinies of the people who live in them." What does that mean to you?
Charlotte Horton: Well, I think you get shaped by a place if you have a relationship with it and Potentino, not just the castle but also the land, has had an enormous influence on my development in my life. It's kind of symbiotic really. It's kind of a mutualism. I give to it, it gives to me. Certainly the land does that. I mean, obviously I'm a wine maker as well. Wine making is very much, represents that type of visceral relationship that you get with a place. Obviously we make the wine at Potentino in the cellars.
Charlotte Horton: I think, if you work with a place and really live it, it becomes transformative in the same way that you transform the grapes that have grown from the land, from a plant that is living off the soil and it's transformed into something. I think transforming is a very important part of having a profound relationship with place.
Suzy Chase: Could you please read the afterward on page 219?
Charlotte Horton: Sure.
Charlotte Horton: Now seems to be a good time to reconnect with the environment that initially created and nurtured our civilization, and to look after the planet that gave us our humanness. Otherwise the future looks very bleak. We need to be more aware of where our food comes from and how it is actually produced. We need to take more care of trees and plants, animals, and insects that we have taken for granted.
Charlotte Horton: Even in my magic paradise, the olive trees are suffering from La Mosca, which was not here 20 years ago. And the Chestnut trees they're being destroyed by another insect, the cinipide. We are terrified of the arrival of the Xylella bacteria, which has devastated the olives in Puglia. Weather patterns are bizarre. Production is irregular and the "Suzuki" fly may be the next for the vines. Geothermal fracking now called "energy farming" is on the horizon for the Amiata mountain. So pollution and reduction of aquifers is a potential threat to our ecosystem and health. The unique biodiversity and history of the golden valley around Potentino becomes more and more valuable. Protecting it is simply and clearly a duty.
Suzy Chase: That's so powerful. So a last question I want to ask you is about the photo and you're in a suit of your favorite designer Yves St. Laurent. So tell me about that suit and did you know, I know you worked at Vogue. Did you know him? Did you meet him?
Charlotte Horton: No, I was not. I'm not quite, I wasn't old enough when I was at Vogue to hang around with Yves St. Laurent. I was a gopher in the fashion room really, but I did have the great chance to be there with Grace Coddington. But no, actually I think my love for Yves St. Laurent, I think my mother had a lot of Yves St. Laurent clothes and I always thought they were extremely chic and elegant. And then when I was growing up, you could buy a lot of really good Yves St. Laurent clothes, second hand, for not very much.
Charlotte Horton: So that was my access to being chic and elegant, was really through vintage Yves St. Laurent. I just find him a very clear designer. I think they're very beautiful. He has a very beautiful cut and a great sense also of how women like to work and be active and look cool.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Charlotte Horton: On Instagram, @CastellodiPotentino. Facebook as well and we also have a website which is Potentino.com, but if you look up Castello di Potentino, you'll find us pretty much everywhere.
Suzy Chase: To purchase A Tuscan Adventure, head on over to DecoratingbytheBook.com. And thank you so much Charlotte for coming on Decorating by the Book Podcast.
Charlotte Horton: Well, thank you Suzy, I've loved as usual, talking about myself and what I get up to. Fantastic. Thank you
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