Once Upon a Time in Umbria...

…there was a beautiful estate dotted with secluded villas cherished by Hollywood royalty. The caretakers were a noble family living out a fairy tale of rustic extravagance

- JASON HOROWITZ

In a former tobacco factory cluttered with bespoke furniture, floor plans, fabric samples, and paint swatches, Count Benedikt Bolza, the architect and designer behind the Umbrian luxury getaway Castello di Reschio, pores over blueprints of his sprawling estate’s graveyards.

“I need to restore the cemeteries,” says Bolza, who is dressed in a Scottish tweed checked jacket, a knotted scarf, and an open white dress shirt. “You know, we think about everything.”

Meticulous, even eccentric, consideration to every last earthly detail has defined the Bolza family approach since Benedikt, 49, accompanied his father four decades ago to scout locations on what he calls a “boys’ trip out to Italy to hunt for a holiday house.” His father, Count Antonio, 79, bought a deconsecrated church (“a speck of an island on the estate,” Bolza calls it) and then in 1994 bought the whole 3,750-acre shebang. Over the past 30 years the Bolza family has transformed nearly 30 ruined farmhouses into stone pleasure palaces, which they designed and sold, all with frictionless turnkey service. The first buyers of the multimillion-dollar homes were bankers, but now there’s “a little bit of Hollywood here and there,” says Bolza, who, despite Gwyneth Paltrow’s having published a picture of her feet at the edge of the Castello pool (she called it “one of my favorite places on earth”), offers only a coyly grateful “indeed, indeed” that the Umbrian hills lack slopes steep enough for skiing.