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, 136ft 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,” Jeanette says. “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
