Live Like Nobility at This Umbrian Hotel Designed by an Italian Count

When choosing the in-room amenities for a new hotel, most hoteliers would install a bunch of Nespresso machines and call it a day. That was out of the question for Count Benedikt Bolza, who didn’t want to have plastic or blinking lights be a fixture in each of the 36 rooms inside his family’s thousand-year-old castle. Instead, he approached a local coffee roaster and asked them to create paper-wrapped espresso pods that would fit into individually sized stainless-steel machines, which he designed with a handle instead of the usual neon blue buttons and had made by a Tuscan maker. Bolza’s exacting approach to the hotel is how he designs everything— he partners with Italian craftsmen to create the items for his B.B. for Reschio line of made-to-order furniture and lighting, which is designed at his architecture studio housed in the estate’s old tobacco factory.

“We wanted to create something that felt like our house because we never left,” Count Bolza, who still lives on the estate with his wife Donna Nencia Corsini, says. “It’s what we would have done if we had stayed there and had all the money in the world and had staff. And so that’s how we did it.”

Trained as an architect at Westminster University in London, Count Bolza, who grew up near Munich—though his family traces its lineage to Lake Como—moved to Reschio in 1999 to help his father Antonio transform the 3,700-acre estate’s untended farmhouses into luxury villas. They began by rewilding the estate, which was used for agriculture until the 1970s, planting oak and chestnut groves, and renovating the houses one by one according to each buyer’s specifications. Count Bolza met his wife, a member of the noble Corsini family—linked to the estate in the 18th century—while she was painting trompe l’oeil frescoes in one of the villas. They raised their five children in the derelict castle while dreaming of transforming it into a hotel, but they didn’t want to bring in a big developer or work with an established brand. The couple finally got the chance thanks to the support of a silent partner who funded the restoration.

“It would have been an impossible task in the beginning when nobody knew us and nobody came to Umbria,” Count Bolza explains. “But 26 years later, after renovating many of the houses and planting something like 20,000 trees, all that effort starts to pay off because people start to understand that this is a special area and this is a reason to come.”

Entering Hotel Castello di Reschio, you can’t tell what year it might be. You walk through the courtyard and the boot room, where Corsini arranges the flowers she picks for the rooms on a rustic wooden table, and Wellingtons are lined up against the back wall. Throughout the castle, marble busts of noblemen, Baroque mirrors, inlaid wood credenzas, and other antiques collected over five years of shopping at the antique fair in Parma mingle with sleek lamps, tables, and four-poster beds. Much of the modern furniture is from the count’s B.B. for Reschio line, which originated when he started designing objects for clients who couldn’t find exactly what they needed for their villas and has become a successful design studio that exhibits at the Salone del Mobile. For the plant-filled Palm Court, he created a new tree-like version of his popular Poggibonsi lamp with cylindrical lights hanging off branch-like arms. And when he couldn’t find the exact Pavone wicker chairs he wanted, he designed a streamlined version with a high arched back and a velvet seat cushion.