By grand design
A heavenly splash of stone amid emerald countryside – this is the immediate and highly agreeable impression of the hotel Borgo Santo Pietro, which lives up to all the superlatives in which it is regularly garlanded, a hidden-away 12th-century villa in the heart of Tuscany. Created by Danish couple Jeanette and Claus Thottrup, the hotel and its sister yacht, 41.5-metre sailing yacht Satori are now twin leaders in luxurious hospitality – but the villa wasn’t always so plush.
The Thottrups bought Borgo in 2001. Already with a house in northern Italy, and then living in London, they decided to buy a property in Tuscany. “We had no idea what we were getting into,” says Jeanette. “It soon became clear that houses in Tuscany were too dark – the opposite of what we wanted. We told the agent, ‘There’s not very much for us here.’ He persuaded us to see one last house: this one. And that was that.”
The couple understood that they had something of a project on their hands.
