This article originally appeared in the September 2012 issue of ELLE DECOR. For more stories from our archive, subscribe to ELLE DECOR All Access.
Once upon a time there was a prince who lived in a castle built of stone. The walls were lined with royal portraits, and when guests arrived—a dazzling group that included kings and queens—they were ushered into a 1970s living room complete with a semicircular sofa and a central fireplace shaped like the mouth of a fish. “You could call it a modern castle,” says Prince Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia of the Pink Panther–worthy palace that he calls his home.
In 1976, when Emanuele Filiberto was four, his parents moved into the house in the village of Vésenaz on Lake Geneva, following three years of design and construction. The prince is a member of Italy’s royal family (his grandfather Umberto II was the last king of Italy), which was forced into exile when the monarchy was expelled by referendum following World War II. His parents, Vittorio Emanuele IV, current head of the House of Savoy, and Marina, princess of Naples, chose to raise their only child in Switzerland.
His mother, a former Swiss waterskiing champion, is a decorating and architecture buff who has designed several homes for the family. “She has incredible taste and creates convivial houses that are all very special,” says Filiberto, who now lives in the Geneva home with his wife, the French actress Clotilde Courau, and their daughters, eight-year-old Princess Vittoria and six-year-old Princess Luisa. “My mother loves to have people over for big lunches and dinners. Her houses are more for others than for herself.”
Take a Look Inside This Wild ‘70s Castle
In the early 1970s, she enlisted the help of a Swiss architect, Jacques Lopez, to build a home outside of Geneva. It was a radical structure even by the standards of the day, incorporating state-of-the-art technology (a wall separating the indoor and outdoor swimming pool opens at the touch of a button) with a flowing, organic design. The rooms were filled with custom-made furniture and embellished with such luxurious finishes as the master bathroom’s eye-catching blue, gray, and silver mosaic. A curved staircase anchors the three-story interior. “My mother hates corners, so there are almost no 90-degree angles in the house,” Filiberto says. “I think to her it’s symbolic: With round edges, there is always an escape route.”
When his parents were in residence, they hosted lavish dinners in the showpiece dining room, where a blue, mirrored ceiling overlooks a lapis lazuli–top table whose base was built into the concrete floor. In addition to royal visitors, Filiberto recalls guests like the photographer Helmut Newton and disco producer Giorgio Moroder enjoying parties in the downstairs cinema and music room. Then there were the elaborate theme parties, like the Moroccan costume fête his mother hosted in honor of her son’s 20th birthday, complete with large tents and camels in the garden. “It was always a big extravaganza,” Filiberto says of those gatherings. “In the 1990s you could do that. Today everything is more low-key.”
Once the interior design was complete, Princess Marina and her architect puzzled over what to do with the exterior. “It was difficult to come up with an idea for the outside that would look like what they had done inside,” Filiberto says. Their solution was to create a surface resembling an antique ruin (not unlike a medieval castle) by covering the house with rocks from Mont Salève in France. Their neighbors, accustomed to more traditional architectural motifs, were initially horrified, the prince recalls. “They called our house ‘the bunker,’” he says. “For that time, it was very modern.”
In 2002, Italy relaxed its policy and for the first time in more than half a century allowed male descendants of the House of Savoy to enter the country. The blue-eyed prince, a former hedge-fund manager, was signed to appear on the Italian version of Dancing with the Stars and tangoed, jitterbugged, and cha cha cha-ed his way to the winning spot. Now a television host and producer in Italy, he divides his time between an olive-oil-producing farm and vineyard in Umbria, an apartment in Paris, and the house in Vésenaz, where he and his family are now the sole occupants (his parents moved to a home in the mountains of Gusted seven years ago).
When Filiberto’s grandfather Umberto II died in 1983, a collection of family heirlooms—from oil paintings to antiques—made its way into the house in Vésenaz. “We tried to integrate the family furniture into those modern spaces,” says the prince, “so now you have a Lichtenstein next to a family portrait, or a very modern bar next to old furniture. But the basic house itself never changed.”
In fact, the original jewel-tone decor is remarkably intact—from the downstairs kitchen with its green cabinets and orange and white tile to a bar cabinet that transforms into a chessboard when closed to the primary bedroom with its built-in concrete platform bed and a tranquil view, through the trees, of Lake Geneva.
“Normally you get fed up with the 1970s,” the prince says, “but even 40 years later this house still looks like it was built five years ago. It’s a living art piece. If today’s kings and queens could build their own castles, perhaps they would do it like that.”
Ingrid Abramovitch, the Executive Editor at ELLE Decor, writes about design, architecture, renovation, and lifestyle, and is the author of several books on design including Restoring a House in the City.
