Surrounded by towering cypress trees, the 15th-century main villa and its modern addition are tucked into the hills just three miles from Florence.Building HeritageShaded by the towering cypress trees that frame his property in the hills outside Florence, the hum of crickets buzzing from the green canopy, Jacopo Spadolini contemplates the villa that has been home to four generations of his family over several decades. The main Renaissance villa, built in the 15th century and spanning around 8,600 square feet over two floors, is where his mother, Valentina, lives. And adjoining it is the modern extension where Jacopo lives with his wife and three young sons, complete with schoolbags in the hallway and toy figures taking over a large back room. A sympathetic contemporary extension to the old brings modern comforts without jarring aesthetics.Building HeritageCentral Florence is just three miles away and you are never far from a view of its soft pink and green marble-clad Duomo rising from the red-tiled rooftops. But from here, in Jacopo’s one-hectare garden, you are tucked away in a Tuscan rural idyll.“My father, Guido, built the new house with my grandfather, Pierluigi, about 30 years ago in the style of a limonaia,” he explains, referring to the traditional Italian ‘lemon house’ that instead of sheltering potted citrus trees from winter frost provides around 4,300 square feet of contemporary living space on one level. Long lunches under a loggia? It must be Tuscany.Building HeritagePierluigi was 85 at the time, but the house was designed to be versatile and future-proofed, including high ceilings and large windows. Two long tables in the indoor/outdoor dining room, whose glass doors open to the garden, hint at long, animated family lunches. The new house also needed to sit unobtrusively alongside the original villa “without making too much of an impact,” says Jacopo, and that’s achieved by mirroring the warm terracotta-hued roof and green shutters of the grandiose original. The ancient property's modern extension was designed to be versatile, future-proofed and to sit alongside the main villa "without making too much of an impact."Building HeritageThese were no amateurs taking on the job, however. Pierluigi—the older brother of the former Italian prime minister Giovanni Spadolini—was an acclaimed architect who set up his practice nearly 75 years ago and specialized in ‘historical modernity’: design that marries Italian heritage with innovation. His son Guido later took over the practice, Spadolini Architetti, and made a name designing fashion outlet malls in the style of traditional borghi (villages). And now Jacopo—who is on the business rather than creative side—is one of five partners steering the architectural studio into the next era, with global hotel, retail and residential projects from Sicily to Shanghai. Famous artists attended the 19th-century salons of previous resident Janet Ross. Meanwhile, none other than Mark Twain rented a villa nearby for a year.Building HeritageThis is no ordinary house, either. Villas in the Florentine hills are havens for wealthy families, and notable past residents of this house included the English couple Henry and Janet Ross, he a banker who made (and largely lost) his fortune in Egypt, she a writer of aristocratic descent. The sociable Rosses—who founded the British Institute of Florence—also made olive oil and wine that they would gift to well-to-do British newcomers to the city. After World War II, the writer Sir Harold Acton—“the last of the expatriate British aesthetes”, as described by the New Yorker—bought the estate for his daughter and her husband, an architect, who undertook extensive renovation of the villa’s ancient stone walls, stone-framed windows and coffered ceilings. “My father, Guido, built the new house with my grandfather, Pierluigi, in the style of a ‘limonaia’ [lemon house].”