AT THE HEIGHT of the Italian Renaissance, the House of Borromeo, a noble family descended from a long line of merchants and bankers, played an important role in shaping Milanese society. Canonized as St. Charles for his charitable work during a period of pestilence and famine, Carlo Borromeo advised his uncle Pope Pius IV and served as the archbishop of Milan from 1564 until his death in 1584. In 1607, his younger cousin Federico, also a prominent figure in the Catholic Reformation, founded the city’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana, one of Europe’s first public libraries, to which he later donated paintings by Botticelli, Bruegel, Caravaggio, da Vinci and Raphael.
“Federico left everything to the church and, in exchange, my family is allowed to eat meat on Fridays and get married in the open air,” says Carlo Borromeo, 41, the founder and creative director of BorromeodeSilva, an automotive and product design firm, on a crisp day this past April. “Talk about the worst deal in the history of mankind.” From the backyard of his 5,300-square-foot property overlooking Lake Varese, less than an hour’s drive northwest of Milan, he can almost make out a cousin’s gray stone palazzo and ordered gardens on Isola Bella — one of three Borromean islands on neighboring Lake Maggiore. (His father, Carlo Ferdinando Borromeo, resides on a smaller nearby island. His mother, the nature photographer and retired fashion designer Paola Marzotto, now lives in Uruguay.) Borromeo’s wife, the fashion designer Marta Ferri, 39, and three of their children — Cristoforo, 8, Alma, 7, and Ernesto, 2 — chase their dog across the lawn. (A fourth child, Ida, was born in October.) Ferri’s mother, the interior and rug designer Barbara Frua De Angeli, is setting the table for lunch.
When Covid-19 arrived in Europe in early 2020, Ferri and Borromeo packed weekend bags and relocated with the children from their apartment in Milan’s historic center to Borgo Egnazia, a seaside hotel on Puglia’s Salento coast that also sells Ferri’s colorful, often made-to-measure dresses. “From one day to another, the whole place shut down,” says Ferri, who ended up staying through June, long after the staff had been sent home. “It was kind of like ‘The Shining’ or a postapocalyptic movie,” Borromeo adds. Ferri, who’d prepare meals using what was available in the cellar, spent entire days gathering artichokes on the grounds and distributing them to neighbors. Some months into lockdown, she and Borromeo flew back to Milan to check on their businesses; needing a valid reason to venture outside, they hired a real estate agent to show them a listing in the countryside. Despite its proximity to the Borromeos’ ancestral castle, the affluent town of Varese was relatively unknown to them.
As they drove up to the house on a winding dirt road lined with lambs and donkeys, Borromeo says, “we looked at each other and we were like, ‘Oh no, we’re in trouble.’” They were immediately charmed. “It became more than just an investment for us,” says Borromeo as he and Ferri walk through the largely glass-walled, mostly single-level structure surrounding a courtyard, out of which now grow a pair of imposing birch and magnolia trees. “It was a project.” Even though the 50-year-old building needed work — it had been unoccupied for a decade — the couple knew they’d discovered something worth preserving. In 1973, following a trip to Tokyo, the Italian poet Gianni Malabarba and his wife, both influential art collectors, had hired a local landscape designer to construct a weekend home inspired by their time abroad. The result is an Italian dwelling in the Japanese vernacular that would make as much sense in Kyoto as it would in California. After acquiring the keys at the beginning of 2021 — the Malabarbas had left the place to their housekeeper, who died about 10 years earlier — the pair got to work replacing windows, rewiring the electrical system, reinforcing walls and raising the foundation. Although they added a fireplace in the living room and redivided the rooms, they were careful, as Ferri says, “to keep the spirit alive.” But, says Borromeo, “we changed basically everything.”
IN THE MAIN entrance, from which the snowcapped Alps are visible in the far distance through massive windows, the peach-hued foyer has been decorated with hand-dyed silk wall coverings from de Gournay’s archival Chinoiserie collection. A short hallway leads into the spacious living area, where the furniture has either been inherited from the couple’s parents or accumulated from previous homes: From their own place in Milan, there are green velvet-covered sofas designed by Vincent Van Duysen for Molteni & C, for whom Ferri is a textile consultant; from Ferri’s father, the photographer and Industria Superstudio founder Fabrizio Ferri, a mirrored Fontana desk.
To the left of the hallway, past the dining room and kitchen, on the far side of the building’s hollow center, are the main bedroom and the two children’s rooms, in which the walls have been painted and papered with vibrant images of rainforest scenes. (In contrast, the walls of the nearby guesthouse, which came with the property and which Ferri and Borromeo have begun calling the Grandma’s Grotto, are papered with a red-and-sand line drawing by De Angeli, who stays there when she visits.) The sinks and toilets in each bathroom have been designated a distinct color: mint green for the kids, dusty pink for the guests and bright orange in the powder room.
Everywhere, there are surprises to discover, from Cristoforo’s favorite teddy bear painted into the wallpaper in his room to a coffee table that was once a gym bench. An unassuming set of stairs off the dining room leads to an office whose ceiling has been hand-painted with a canopy of leaves by Pictalab, the same team of artisans who worked on Ferri’s atelier in Milan. The room’s shelves hold miniature sports cars made from Lego bricks.
A side door opens onto a roof garden filled with containers of delicately wired and gnarled trees: maple, cypress, hinoki, zelkova and elm. Recently, Borromeo has been spending more time up here training and pruning his bonsai creations. “In the city, if you’re not doing something, you feel like you’re failing,” says Ferri. “Here, we can enjoy doing nothing.” Borromeo leans in to inspect a newly potted apple tree. The roots are strong, he’s happy to report; now it’s up to him which way the branches grow. “It may not look like much today,” he says. “But you’ll see.”
