Luciano Giubbilei’s most recent project is a homecoming of sorts. At Casa Newton, a small hotel overlooking the Val d’Orcia from the Tuscan hills, the acclaimed Italian landscape designer has created a garden of reverent romance an hour away from Siena, where he grew up. As a schoolboy footballer, Giubbilei spent his weekends travelling to local fixtures across the lush valley, the peak of Monte Amiata rising in the distance. The landscape has remained etched in his memory for the past three decades he has lived in London.
“To come back to this area and make a garden is a very special experience,” says Giubbilei, winner of three Chelsea Flower Show Gold Medals. His atmospheric combination of meticulous green architecture and swaths of flowers is epitomised in the much-lauded gardens of Potter’s House, the Mallorcan home he acquired from the late ceramicist Maria Antònia Carrió in 2017. He has also conjured a Tuscan meadow for the Hermès SS24 catwalk, and has renovated the 18th-century walled gardens at Raby Castle in County Durham – one of his biggest commissions to date.
Centranthus, libertia, cypress and fig at the entrance to the garden at Casa Newton © Andrew Montgomery
Casa Newton is a striking red-brick villa built in 1846 by a descendant of Isaac Newton, and opened as an 11-room hotel in 2023. Giubbilei has known the owners, the architect Antonie Bertherat-Kioes and her husband Philippe Bertherat, for more than a decade, first working with them on a garden at their neighbouring winery. This new project was four years in the making (a timescale fairly typical of Giubbilei’s slow-grown schemes). It flows around the house with a kind of witty formality – slim cypresses popping up from the centre of hedges like elegant surprises.
