Imagine living on an unspoilt bosky hillside overlooking a turquoise sea, completely quiet, seeing just the stars at night, and surrounded by nature. Heaven! Terry Dwan did imagine all that when she bought a piece of land above Portofino in Liguria. But there is always a serpent in paradise – it has taken 19 years to realise her Eden. The discovery of the site arose from a family tragedy. ‘Helen was six and Peter was two and in 1999 I was pregnant with a third child,’ says Dwan. ‘We [she and her husband, the architect Antonio Citterio] needed a holiday house for a larger family. We bought a house in the town of Portofino, but halfway through the term I lost the baby. In December I said to Antonio: “Why don’t we take a walk up the hill?” There had been a restaurant up there, and the land was for sale. I bought it in January 2000. I could never have done that with a newborn.’
Although Portofino is only two hours by plane from Milan, where she and her husband run their separate architecture-and -design companies, it is centuries away when it comes to construction practices. Clearing the site of the rubbish that had been dumped there – broken washing machines, smashed chairs – was backbreaking, and seemingly endless, but simple compared with navigating the local building restrictions. The hillside is jealously guarded by the Portofino park authority, some thing for which Terry is grateful, despite it often taking four years to get a simple permission. Of the seven huts on the site, six had been used for storage by farmers cultivating the olive trees on the terraced hillside, and the slightly larger one, at just under four metres by six, had been the restaurant. As soon as she bought the site Dwan took up residency in Portofino. ‘It was funny, coming from Los Angeles, such a heavily populated city, to find myself a citizen of a place with 600 inhabitants,’ she says.
Structural engineering was a regular dinnertime topic when Dwan was growing up, one of four children of a chemical engineer, and from an early age she was a devotee of the work of the architect Pier Luigi Nervi. When her mother died, her father married a woman with five children, and family holidays were spent camping. A trip to the Olympic National Park in Washington state, with its caverns and sequoia trees cloaked in moss, reminded her of Nervi’s work, and confirmed in her an ambition to make architecture that responds to nature.
After a first degree, two years with an architecture practice in Los Angeles, a postgraduate degree at Yale, and a Fulbright scholarship to Rome, she was more qualified than Citterio when they met on a project in Amsterdam in 1985, though he was her boss. ‘At that time I had more architectural knowledge, but he had the clients,’ she says. They became business partners in 1987 and married in 1989, but by 1993 they ‘were fighting all the time and realised it was better to work separately’.
Work on her hillside moved very slowly indeed. ‘It rains a lot in Liguria and the weather works against you, and in a remote village you don’t have much control over a project,’ she says. ‘On a typical building site I can pop in quickly and unexpectedly, but here in a village it’s slow. Slow is an understatement!’ Factor in the difficulty of getting to the site – only a tiny car or a three-wheeled horticultural buggy can get up the hillside, and even then it takes 30 minutes – and you can see where the 18 years went. She and the children camped in the defunct restaurant at first, with a leaching field for sewage, gas bottles for heating, and aqueduct water.
Although they are now connected to mains water, gas and electricity, Dwan relishes the fact that you have to go outside in rain, wind or sun to reach another building. Three of them are complete, two of two storeys, with concrete cores but clad in wood, and one of a single level clad in stone. There is a quiet reading room in one with black window frames intended to encourage contemplation of the view, as through a picture frame. The main living room and kitchen, on the top storey of a wooden building, has wonderful views of the sea and surrounding hills to the front, and double doors at the back that open on to the higher level behind.
Underneath it is the ‘hippie’ bedroom with its four poster bed, red wall and sublime views, and a shower room and a bathroom behind. There is a dormitory in the stone-clad building, with three cherrywood Shaker-style beds in a row and, outside it, a modern terrace planted with banksia roses and a vine of the exquisite fragolino grape, which tastes like wild strawberries. Another vine grows over a rustic frame of robinia wood on the terrace above, where Dwan’s ‘Borgos’ chairs for Driade sit on paving of rounded river stones alongside pots of Verbena bonariensis and grasses.
Four years ago Dwan contacted her friend Stefano Baccari, a landscape designer who has worked for such interior-design stars as Paola Navone and Patricia Urquiola, to make a natural garden. He already knew the site – as a teenager he and his friends used to ride their horses to the restaurant there. ‘It has the most perfect micro climate and wonderful soil,’ he says. ‘There are all sorts of wild orchids and other extraordinary species. Here in Liguria they had very little space on the terraces, so the olive trees were planted close together, and they grow tall and very graceful.’ He has made the place even more romantic, impossible as that seems – grass steps fringed with white valerian and Stipa tenuissima grass amble down beside the buildings from terraces above. ‘I love that you have almost to push the plants aside as you walk,’ he says. Surrounded by a simple teak walkway, the swimming pool is equally lowkey, with a black interior that causes the water to ripple dark green at its surface. ‘The children love coming here,’ says Dwan. And what of the star architect? ‘Antonio complained all the way but loves it now we have a bathroom en suite’.
For more about Terry Dwan’s practice, Dwan Studio, visit terrydwan.com. Studio Baccari. Visit studiobaccari.com
A version of this article appears in the June 2018 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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