Reschio – A Lifetime In One Place
- 7 days ago
- 13 min read
Updated: 9 hours ago
Count Benedikt Bolza on architecture, family, craft and the slow work of continuing a place.
© Reschio
At some point during our conversation in the Tabaccaia, Count Benedikt Bolza admits that he occasionally walks into one of the houses he restored twenty years ago and wonders what on earth he was thinking.
Why did we put the pool there? That room should really open towards the hills.
One of his daughters is sitting with us as he says it. Later, Bolza opens a presentation and takes me backwards through Reschio: abandoned farmhouses, collapsed roofs, the Castello before it became a hotel, construction sites, experiments, before-and-after images and houses that may yet be altered again.
It is an unusually revealing way for an architect to speak about his own work. There is little interest in defending the finished image. What seems to fascinate him more is what happens afterwards — how a building ages, where an idea proves itself, where daily life exposes a weakness, how a landscape changes and how one’s own understanding changes with it.
Most architects eventually leave their buildings behind.
Bolza has spent nearly three decades doing the opposite.
He lives among them.
Reschio Estate before Reschio Estate before Reschio Estate before Reschio Estate after Reschio Estate after Reschio Estate after
© Reschio
A family looking for somewhere to root
The story of Reschio begins before Benedikt Bolza became its architect.
His parents discovered Umbria in the early 1980s after years of renting houses in Italy for the summer. An advertisement led them to San Martino, an old house hidden within the hills on the border between Umbria and Tuscany. They bought it in 1984, initially without realising quite how literally it was an island: almost all the surrounding land belonged to the much larger Reschio estate.
For Benedikt’s father, Antonio Bolza, the encounter carried a history of its own. He had fled Hungary with his family in 1949, at the age of five, leaving land, possessions and animals behind. Benedikt believes that loss remained with him — along with an enduring desire to regain some form of land, animals and permanence.
Ten years after San Martino, in 1994, his parents managed to acquire the estate around it.
What they bought was not the Reschio that now appears in photographs.
There were around fifty abandoned farmhouses scattered through the hills, a ruined castle, poor infrastructure and buildings whose roofs had disappeared into vegetation. Benedikt, then studying architecture in London, already knew them surprisingly well. One of his summer jobs had been to find and measure the houses hidden across the estate, checking that all fifty really existed.
London matters in this story.
Reschio can easily be read as a retreat from the modern world — an enclave so self-contained that its hosts might appear to have simply inherited another reality. But Benedikt Bolza trained outside it. He studied architecture at the University of Westminster and spent time working in London before returning in 1999.
He came back with his wife, Donna Nencia Corsini, a restorator and artist, and their growing family. They moved into the Castello and began the long process of learning what this particular landscape and its buildings demanded.
Not escaping the world.
Choosing where to apply what he had learned from it.
Architect Benedikt Bolza, shaping Reschio Estate with local craftsmanship and his family Architect Benedikt Bolza, shaping Reschio Estate with local craftsmanship and his family Architect Benedikt Bolza, shaping Reschio Estate with local craftsmanship and his family
© Reschio
The architect who stayed
The family could never have restored every ruin at once.
That limitation became part of the method.
Individual houses were sold to owners who wanted a home at Reschio, while Benedikt Bolza and his team took responsibility for architecture, construction, interiors and, later, maintenance. Some owners have now been connected to the estate for almost thirty years.
Bolza is careful with the language around this.
Reschio, he told me, is not a development.
“The real development happened eight or nine centuries ago.”
His work, as he sees it, is to find contemporary lives for buildings whose first purpose was decided generations before him.
More than thirty of the original farmhouses have now been restored; in our conversation he put the number at 33. They are not treated as variations of a single house type. Each ruin arrives with its own orientation, masonry, traces, practical logic and relationship with the terrain.
The lessons were often more valuable than those of architectural school.
Bolza talks about learning from local builders how far an arch can span, how an old wall needs to breathe, how stone, brick, lime and timber behave, how a traditional cellar or vault is constructed. Many of the artisans working with Reschio belong to families that have practised their trades for generations. Some of the people Benedikt first learned from have since been joined or succeeded by their children.
The vocabulary of the buildings comes from observation rather than a catalogue of regional motifs.
A tobacco-drying tower might suggest a detail elsewhere. A traditional vaulted wine cellar becomes a lesson in structure. Old roof tiles, beams and masonry return to use. Something apparently inconvenient may be left because it tells the building’s story better than a perfected replacement.
One of Benedikt’s examples is almost comically modest: a wall of concrete blocks from the 1930s that would have been easy to remove. Instead, it was painted red and incorporated into a fireplace.
The instinct is not preservation at all costs.
It is to ask whether transformation might require less erasure.
Translating Context into Structure Translating Context into Structure Translating Context into Structure
© Reschio
A lifetime of corrections
The unusual advantage of staying with one place for so long is that Reschio has become a testing ground for its own architecture.
An owner will explain that a kitchen does not work quite as expected. A cupboard proves too small. A service route feels wrong. Benedikt Bolza walks into an older house and sees a decision his younger self would no longer make.
Houses return to the drawing board. Pools move. Rooms open towards different views. Landscape treatments become softer. Materials reveal whether they have aged with dignity or merely deteriorated.
“These houses are living organisms,” he told me. After ten years, they may want to change just as people do.
There is something liberating in hearing an architect say this.
Architecture culture tends to privilege the moment of completion. Buildings are photographed before people have truly occupied them, surfaces are still immaculate and the architect’s intention remains intact.
Reschio provides the opposite condition: decades of use, critique, maintenance and second thoughts.
Bolza does not only design for occupation.
He designs from occupation.
And he is grateful, he says, that the family never had the resources to restore everything at once. Had they finished all fifty houses in one concentrated period, much of what they learned later would have arrived too late.
Slowness was not a concept.
It was circumstance.
Only afterwards did it become knowledge.
Reschio Houses for Rent: Barco Reschio Houses for Rent: Barco Reschio Houses for Rent: Bell'Aria
© Reschio
From the wall to the door handle
This long involvement also explains Bolza’s unusually expansive understanding of his profession.
He speaks about architecture almost in the older sense of the word: not as responsibility for a shell handed over to another discipline, but as the attempt to carry one idea through structure, interiors, furniture, lighting and the smallest objects.
Contemporary projects, he argues, are often split between so many specialised teams that coherence gradually disappears.
At Reschio he tries to hold the thread.
A staircase and a table are not separate design problems. Nor are a lamp, a piece of silverware, a door handle or the quality of light falling across a room.
The furniture grew out of exactly this process.
For years, pieces were simply designed because a particular house needed them and nothing available felt right. Beds, tables, lamps and fittings accumulated. Guests and homeowners began asking whether they could order them, too.
What began as B.B. for Reschio has since grown into Reschio Collections: furniture, lighting and objects conceived through life on the estate and made with specialist artisans. Reschio’s current description still traces the collection back to that practical beginning — objects designed because the right one could not be found.
Bolza laughs about the strange afterlife this gives his work. Sometimes he receives a photograph of one of his pieces in an entirely different house and is not quite sure he likes seeing it there.
The reaction is revealing.
The objects were not designed to populate a catalogue.
They belonged to a world first.
As in Pintaverna, most of the houses in Reschio are furnished with bespoke furniture and lighting As in Pintaverna, most of the houses in Reschio are furnished with bespoke furniture and lighting As in Pintaverna, most of the houses in Reschio are furnished with bespoke furniture and lighting
© Reschio
Holding the thread does not mean working alone
There is an obvious danger in telling Reschio through one architect.
The estate can easily become the story of a singular auteur, particularly because Bolza’s hand is visible from architecture to furniture.
But Reschio is emphatically not the work of one person.
The architecture and design office includes several architects, interior designers and product designers; a wider creative team works across other disciplines. Across the estate, around 300 people are employed, many from the surrounding region or people who have relocated there.
The Tabaccaia where we spoke illustrates the distinction well.
Built as a tobacco-processing facility in the 1940s and converted into estate offices in 2013, it is now the creative centre of Reschio: architecture and design share the building with graphic design, photography and film.
Yet it would be misleading to imagine every craftsperson working within a self-sufficient private workshop behind its walls.
Many of the things designed there are made by long-established family businesses within roughly twenty minutes of the estate, then return to the Tabaccaia for checking and finishing before finding their final place.
Reschio is not interesting because it has managed to remove itself from its surroundings.
It is interesting because its boundaries remain porous.
Skills move in and out.
So do people, materials and knowledge.
Tabaccaia di Reschio Tabaccaia di Reschio Tabaccaia di Reschio
© Reschio
The habits of a house
I understood this most clearly not while looking at architecture, but while trying to embroider. The stitches looked perfectly manageable when demonstrated by the woman sitting opposite me. In my own hands, considerably less so.
She was a regional artist and designer who had returned home after a career in fashion and immersed herself in a traditional embroidery technique. Her English was limited. My Italian was considerably worse. Somehow, neither mattered very much.
She showed me the rhythm again.
I tried.
She quietly repaired the consequences.
And for a while I became completely absorbed in the tiny logic of needle, thread and repeated movement.
What stayed with me was not the idea of an “activity”.
It was the privilege of having someone who had spent years acquiring a skill give me her time.
Reschio calls practices such as embroidery, ceramics, bookbinding and herbalism Household Habits. The term is useful because it removes them, at least partly, from the language of resort entertainment. These were once simply among the things that happened around a working country estate: objects needed repairing, food preserving, cloth sewing, tools making, knowledge passing from one pair of hands to another. Today guests can join and learn from the people keeping those practices alive.
My first encounter with archery followed a similar pattern.
I had expected to shoot a bow.
Instead, I met a man who was a journalist by profession and an obsessive historian of archery by inclination. The association he belonged to researched historical techniques and materials, demonstrated them at historic gatherings and built bows using methods that belonged to another era.
The shooting became almost secondary.
A bow could take a day to understand and much longer to make.
For those with enough patience, it is possible to spend the time making one rather than merely firing a few arrows.
Again, the difference is small but important.
Culture is not being presented only to be watched.
Someone is still practising it.
photography by Lind
Embroidery at Hotel Reschio Embroidery at Hotel Reschio Embroidery at Hotel Reschio
photography by Linda Pezzei
A working estate
The same refusal of neat categories appears elsewhere.
Reschio is a hotel, a group of privately owned and rented houses, an architecture studio, a farm, woodland, gardens, workshops, kitchens and stables.
Count Benedikt Bolza describes the hotel almost as the most visible expression of something much larger.
The estate came first.
So did the horses.
Their presence reaches back into his father’s story and his desire to recover something of the land and animals lost when his family left Hungary. What began decades later with Spanish horses became a substantial equestrian culture of its own.
Like much at Reschio, it is not justified primarily through efficiency.
Benedikt Bolza is quite open about the fact that the horses demand enormous amounts of work and resources. They remain because the family considers them fundamental to the life of the place.
Agriculture is similarly better understood as a continuing experiment than as a completed sustainability story. The family works with an orto, grain, olive trees, water systems, woodland and other parts of the estate as increasingly interconnected cycles. But Benedikt Bolza does not speak as though the problem has been solved.
There is still better forest management to understand.
Undergrowth to control.
Agricultural products to rethink.
Energy systems to improve without turning the landscape itself into technical infrastructure.
The loops are continually being adjusted.
Reschio’s current public language likewise describes itself as a living estate rather than a finished resort, shaped across decades by the family, architects, creatives and custodians of the land.
The important word is living.
Living things require work.
Teatro Equestre - Reschio Estate Teatro Equestre - Signor Conte and Casanova - Reschio Estate Reschio Estate - Foraging
© Reschio
Learning darkness
One evening at Reschio, the landscape seemed to disappear almost completely.
That is rarer than it should be.
We have become so accustomed to lighting buildings, paths, gardens, trees and horizons that darkness can feel like an omission.
Here it is part of the architecture.
Benedikt Bolza talks about lighting as one of the areas in which his own thinking has changed most dramatically. Early projects taught him how quickly technical solutions age. Gradually the emphasis shifted towards pools of warm light, less illumination and greater reliance on the natural rhythms already present.
Outside, they light almost nothing.
The valley, he says, should never glow “like a stadium.”
Walking there after dusk, the effect is physical.
The boundaries soften. The scale of the land becomes harder to measure. An animal may cross at the edge of vision. Houses that seemed substantial during the day recede into the hills.
Despite the villas, roads, people and considerable infrastructure required to keep such a place functioning, there are moments when the landscape appears remarkably untouched.
Not because nobody has worked on it.
Because so much of the work has involved deciding what not to make visible.
Castello di Reschio Exterior view Castello di Reschio - The Swimming Pool Hotel Castello di Reschio - The Palm Court
© Reschio
The question of luxury
None of this changes the fact that access to Reschio is expensive.
A stay at the hotel or in one of its houses belongs to a level of hospitality available to relatively few people. The resources required to care for 1,500 hectares, restore ancient buildings, maintain horses, commission specialist craftsmanship and employ hundreds of people are considerable.
Pretending otherwise would turn restraint itself into another luxury cliché.
Count Benedikt Bolza seems aware of the contradiction.
When we talked about artists being drawn to the estate, he wondered aloud whether the cost of staying there might prevent exactly some of the people who could respond most interestingly to the place from spending meaningful time in it. Perhaps, he said, some more accessible format could exist one day.
The thought remained unresolved.
That is perhaps why it felt credible.
Reschio does not make luxury disappear. It proposes a particular version of what resources might be used for: repairing buildings rather than replacing them, sustaining craft relationships, managing land, employing people, keeping horses, allowing darkness and making things intended to last.
That does not resolve the question of privilege.
It simply makes the question more interesting than gold taps and thread counts.
Much of the comfort here depends on restraint rather than addition.
The freedom to be social or solitary.
To sit at a long table or disappear into the landscape.
To eat elaborately or spend an afternoon struggling with a needle.
To be entertained — or not.
Reschio seems surprisingly uninterested in demanding that one perform the experience of being there.
Castello di Reschio - Ristorante Al Castello - The Terrace Castello di Reschio - The Palm Court Castello di Reschio - The Palm Court Bar
© Reschio
Growing inward
When Benedikt Bolza speaks about the future, he does not talk about another estate.
People apparently ask him where the “next Reschio” will be.
His answer is simple:
“I don’t have another family; I have this one.”
It is the same with the place.
The future, as he describes it, lies in going deeper rather than larger.
One direction is the collection of furniture, lighting and everyday objects already growing out of the estate.
Another is generational continuity.
And then there is education: Over the years, Reschio has informally trained gardeners, stable hands, hospitality staff, craftspeople and young people from surrounding communities. Count Benedikt Bolza is now interested in giving that process a more deliberate form: perhaps a small school or foundation where people could move between hospitality, agriculture, gardening, maintenance and craft, learning by doing before deciding where their aptitude lies.
He also wants to document some of the architectural knowledge accumulated across three decades: traditional construction, finishes, lime paint, proportions, materials — practical information that can disappear remarkably quickly once nobody is left to teach it.
This may ultimately be more important than another restored villa.
Because Reschio’s real resource is not only land.
It is accumulated knowledge.
Another person already at the table
Towards the end of our conversation in the Tabaccaia, Benedikt Bolza returned to the presentation. The photographs moved from ruins to construction sites to completed houses, then back again to things that may yet be reconsidered.
Architecture did not appear as a sequence of masterpieces.
It looked more like a long family album of decisions.
Some successful.
Some provisional.
Some ready to be questioned by the next person who lives with them long enough.
His daughter had been sitting beside us for much of the conversation.
At the time, it seemed incidental.
Later, thinking about his reluctance to imagine a “next Reschio”, it felt like perhaps the clearest image of what continuation actually means.
Not another estate waiting somewhere beyond the Umbrian hills.
Another generation already at the table.
Reschio is compelling not because its model can easily be replicated. It probably cannot.
Nor because every contradiction has been resolved. It has not.
What stays with me is something simpler: the decision to remain with one place long enough to be corrected by it.
Count Benedikt Bolza returned as a young architect believing he could restore these buildings. Nearly three decades later, he speaks just as often about what the buildings, craftsmen, owners, animals, landscape and family have taught him.
Keeping a place alive, it turns out, may have less to do with preserving it unchanged than with being willing to continue learning from it.
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The Reschio Cosmos
Hosts_Count Benedikt Bolza, Donna Nencia Corsini and family
Origin_Antonio and Angelika Bolza
Architecture & creative direction_Benedikt Bolza / BB for Reschio
Architecture & interiors_BB for Reschio and the in-house Architecture & Design Studio
Creative hub_The Tabaccaia
Craft_Regional family workshops and specialist artisans
Objects_Reschio Collections
Hospitality_Reschio Hotel and Houses
Landscape_1,500 hectares of woodland, farmland, gardens and restored buildings between Umbria and Tuscany
Agriculture_Orto, grain, olives, woodland and evolving estate cycles
Horses_Reschio stables and its Spanish horses
Household Habits_Embroidery, ceramics, bookbinding, herbalism and other practices shared through making
Next generation_The Bolza family and the possible future of education, craft and knowledge transfer at Reschio
Further Threads from Reschio
Donna Nencia Corsini
The forms of authorship that sit beyond architecture: art, gardens, domestic rituals, colour and the habits that make a house lived in.
A former tobacco-processing building turned creative centre, where architecture, design, graphics and image-making meet.
Lime, stone, brick, vaults and the practical intelligence carried by generations of local craftspeople.
Following the objects born from specific architectural needs as they begin lives beyond the estate.
From a needle at Reschio towards Panicale and the women keeping regional embroidery knowledge alive.
Historical bowmaking
Archery not as recreation alone, but as a route into material history, reconstruction and embodied knowledge.
A thread connecting family memory, land, animal care and the evolving culture of the estate.
The Orto
Food as one element in a larger agricultural system rather than an isolated farm-to-table claim.
Darkness
What happens when landscape design includes the decision not to illuminate.
An artist whose relationship with Reschio grew organically from an encounter with its horses and landscape.
Learning at Reschio
The possibility of turning decades of practical knowledge in architecture, hospitality, farming and craft into a place of education.
Umbria
Beyond the estate itself: the workshops, villages and people that make Reschio less an enclave than a node within a regional network.
