In 1968, Elsa Peretti bought a modest cottage she had seen in Spain for a few thousand dollars – all she could afford at the time. Since then, her fortunes grew and grew, and now to celebrate her legacy with Tiffany & Co – a match made 50 years ago – the jewellery house has launched three new designs in her memory: a Bone ring, a Split ring and a Bone cuff in 18-carat gold set with a teardrop of pavé diamonds. Organic and sensual, they are as relevant now as they were a half-century ago, and they transport us to the village of Sant Martí Vell, in Spain’s Catalonia region, where Elsa discovered that house.
It was passionate adoration from the moment she first saw the Casa Pequeña, cradled by roses and wisteria, on a starry night. The cottage, part of a ruinous village halfway up a hill, would become both a sanctuary and a place of inspiration. Elsa’s father, Ferdinando, was as rich as Croesus but, scandalised by his daughter turning her back on the family’s conservative ways, left her to make a living for herself.
Elsa taught French and worked as a ski instructor in Gstaad before she took a degree in interior design and worked in Milan for the architect Dado Torrigiani. In 1964, she became a fashion model, working in Barcelona and hanging out with a group of Catalan creatives – architect Ricardo Bofill and sculptor Xavier Corberó among them – who were against Franco’s fascist regime and known as la gauche divine (the divine left). In 1968, Elsa moved to New York, and her career soared.
In addition to modelling, she began experimenting with jewellery , working with a Spanish silversmith, Vincent Abad, and creating a pendant piece on a long leather thong, inspired by a bud vase she had found in a flea market. The piece was worn by one of the models in a show by Giorgio di Sant’Angelo – the designer whose work was then the quintessence of haute hippie – and was an instant success. Her modelling career also proved to be a catalyst: in 1968 she returned from an assignment in Mexico with an element of a horse’s saddle that, reworked in silver, would make an effective belt; and in the early ’70s she became one of the so-called Halstonettes, the cabine of the famed designer Halston.
She began designing jewellery for him – pieces that captured the spirit of the age: a small bottle in lacquer on a long, beautifully made knotted silk thread, for instance. And then, in 1974, Tiffany came calling. For them, she brought all her inspirations into play: in Sant Martí Vell, she saw a snake’s skeleton and transformed it into a necklace; scorpions soon followed.
Her creativity seemed boundless – taking form as hearts, buckles, beans (a lighter, a cufflink, an evening purse), bones, apples, mesh – and the impact her jewellery had was remarkable: decades later, it would influence designers such as Tom Ford. The attitude with which she wore, for instance, the belt pieces, created in the ’60s and ’70s, also went far beyond their time. Among the buildings she preserved at Sant Martí Vell are her laboratory, which is filled with an embarrassment of her sketches, and what is now a museum displaying her works alongside the ravishing pieces that she collected – antique Chinese bowls of delicately coloured iced celadon among them.
Elsa eventually came to own a host of other properties – in Manhattan (cool and white, with rattan on the floor), and in Italy (put together with her great friend Renzo Mongiardino); there was a house on the Porto Ercole coastline that featured a fireplace in the form of a furious, fantastical man belching flames, and antiqued trompe l’oeil that seemed to open to the skies, with branches nodding at the cracks; and an apartment in Rome that conjured up Mongiardino’s more imperial tastes. Sant Martí Vell, however, remained closest to her heart. With the wealth that her work with Tiffany & Co brought her (in 2013, the house renewed their exclusive contract, with Elsa receiving royalties and a lump sum of $47 million), her interest in the village was amplified.
There are now 18 Elsa houses, and three masias , or country homes, all now heritage sites for the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation. Her original house remains modest, its additions costly but subtle: there is a pool discreetly hidden on a lower terrace, for instance, and sculptures dotted throughout the gardens; in the dining area, Elsa designed a raised free-form fireplace, and in these modest spaces her astonishing works of art are now gathered. As she acquired more and more houses, Elsa’s vision grew.
The long stone building that was once for tax collection has had its floors ripped out and a striking copper fireplace by Lanfranco Bombelli, which climbs through three floors, put in. (A huge millstone has been placed at the bottom – a “table” for entertaining and a clarion call for the parties once held here.) When Elsa bought a farmhouse on the other side of her vineyards, the old farmer who sold it was devastated to be leaving; Elsa had him stay on, and they lived in the house together.
(Peretti passed away in 2021, at the age of 80.) A gnarled, blackened staircase, a thing of absolute beauty, rises to a bedroom. In one corner is her Padova cutlery set, pinned to the wall.
The flask for the water is like a silvered vessel with an opening for your hand. The sinuous silver candlesticks, abstracted from cow bones, hold candles reaching up to the sky. Elsa’s world is a potent one.
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