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Journalist and interior expert from London Kate Watson-Smyth had long dreamed of buying a second home in Italy. She just didn’t expect to end up buying a 300-year-old, 24-room villa. The stately home, located in a village half an hour from Turin, kept popping up during her searches with her husband Adam Leigh, so they finally went to view it — “just to rule it out, because it was way too big,” she recalls.
Spoiler: It stole their hearts right away. “Adam walked around one corner and I walked around the other, and we looked over the hedge. When we met in the middle, we were both crying, and we hadn’t even looked in yet,” she says.
Decorating 24 rooms proved easy, thanks to the last owner, who offered to sell some existing pieces, and the fact that Watson-Smyth had a stock of furniture just sitting around London. But the house’s foundations were clearly in need of an update, and reality finally hit them when they got the keys in spring 2023. “We couldn’t talk for half an hour. It was like, ‘Oh my God, what have we done?’ The scale of it was terrifying, but at the same time it was my dream,” Watson-Smyth says.
As a seasoned remodeler who created an interior design class to help others, her goal wasn’t to make the historic home look brand new, but rather to make it look “like we moved in and just freshened it up.” They fell in love with the faded wall colors and embraced a quintessential Italian country kitchen with a simple marble countertop and open lower shelves.
There was no budget for major structural work, so she planned the layout, allocating six bedrooms, four bathrooms, two studies, two kitchens and two lounges. For herself and Leigh, she created a luxurious master bedroom with an adjoining bathroom and dressing room. The inspiration for the room’s wallpaper came from the ancient wisteria plant growing outside, beloved by the house’s former owner, a woman named Claudia who lived there with her granddaughter Lucrezia. Watson-Smyth named the room in Claudia’s honour. “We wanted to honour her as the matriarch of a much-loved family home,” she says. Painting the freestanding bath next to it in a matching shade of lilac was the next logical step.
Watson-Smyth kept the theme going when naming the bedrooms: the one with the floral ceiling is named after Lucrezia, while the pink and yellow suite is called Gloria, after Leigh’s mother, who loved Italy and had an apartment in Liguria for 30 years. To give each space even more personality, she worked with paint brand Graphenstone to create a range of 12 shades (available for shopping). The fact that Graphenstone paints are breathable—in other words, they improve indoor air quality and prevent mold—was a big draw. “If you’re not going to be in a house for a while, you have to be very careful about moisture and mold,” she says.
The encaustic cement bathroom tile offered Watson-Smyth another chance to flex her design muscles. Made with Maitland & PoateOne of the patterns is based on a tile she found in a scrapyard outside Turin. The colours were mixed to match the paint range exactly, “which has never been done before and seemed like a good idea,” she explains. The size of the property has also presented a business opportunity, but not of the Airbnb variety. Watson-Smyth offers design retreats so that in addition to shopping, people can also attend workshops and lectures in the house (and of course eat a few slices of pizza).
When Watson-Smyth’s grown-up sons visit, there’s no shortage of places to retreat. A once-clumsy hallway is now a cozy playroom, wrapped in a sweeping mural and complete with a card table. The upstairs sitting room (previously all white) has been transformed into a striking green and draped in Liberty wallpaper. When the carpet was taken up, it revealed old terracotta tiles that were sadly ruined beyond repair, so they were ripped out and leaned against the concrete, which Watson-Smyth, who sees only the positives, eventually plans to polish. “It works because I like the juxtaposition between it and the incredibly luxurious wall coverings,” she says.
The most satisfying thing about the project, however, is that all the locals, including Claudia, approve of it. “Everyone was afraid that we would tear it all out and fill it with marble. But[they told us]it actually looks like it’s always been like this,” she says. “That’s the biggest compliment anyone could have given me.”
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