How Kate Watson-Smyth accidentally upsized to an achingly romantic villa in 'the Versailles of Italy'

The decision to downsize once your children have flown the nest is one that most parents face at some point. For interior designer Kate Watson-Smyth, though, it was almost pressed upon her – not by her husband, or her children, but by her architect – and she ended up upsizing by mistake.

“I had a text late one Saturday night from our architect who was at the pub,” she remembers. “And he said his friends had been trying to buy a house on our street, and wanted to buy ours. He’d heard us talking about wanting to buy a second home in Italy, and had assumed this meant we had already bought something. The market was quite hot at that point, so we thought, ‘why not?’”

There was only one snag: Kate and her husband hadn’t actually found their Italian second home yet. What’s more, they also wanted to retain a base in London, ideally a small flat where their two grown-up sons could pop in and out as they pleased.

“We found a London house quite quickly, a little Victorian workers cottage,” she explains. “And then we started our Italian house hunt. We felt strongly that we didn’t want a holiday home, it needed to be somewhere that we could work, too. I knew if we found somewhere close to where we’d been on holiday for the last 30 years, I’d never want to get my laptop out. So we were looking at Piedmont, and then we discovered Turin.”

The couple fell in love with Turin and its beautiful, elegant squares. “It’s called the Versailles of Italy,” Kate explains. “It’s only an hour and a half from the coast at Genoa, and it’s an hour from the mountains.” One property in particular kept coming up during their searches, but the couple disregarded it because of its size, with 24 rooms and three storeys.

Kate Watson-Smyth: “It was just far too big, we knew that. Eventually we decided to go and see it to rule it out. Famous last words. We split up and walked around the property from either side and met again at the front, and we were both crying, like we were at a funeral. The tears were rolling. Because we were in love. So we came back the next day and met the estate agent. The previous owners were a couple who had five children. Originally it had been their summer house in the 1960s before they moved in full-time during the 1980s, with only the nonna and her granddaughter living there before we moved in.

“We flew to Italy to sign the papers and get the keys in April 2023. The renovation then took seven months, with the builders finishing three days before Christmas Day. We had reconfigured it so that it was six bedrooms and four bathrooms, and myself and my husband each have our own study. We also kept the two kitchens – one on the ground floor and one on the top floor – because of how long it takes to get everywhere. There’s also a beautiful cantina with vaulted ceilings and a traditional working pizza oven too, which is in the oldest part of the house, dating back to the 1700s.

“The key with a big house is that every room has to have a purpose. So we’ve fallen into a routine where we might cook dinner downstairs and have it in the dining room, then we might have an early evening drink in the downstairs sitting room. There’s only one television in the house so you have to go all the way to the upstairs sitting room for that. The downstairs sitting room has very thick walls, so is much cooler in the summer, whereas the third-floor sitting room has five windows and is really hot in the summer, so that’s the winter sitting room.

“When it came to decorating, I tried to have a reason for why a certain wallpaper or paint colour was chosen, whether it was something in the ceiling artwork, or outside the window. We decorated one of the sitting rooms with a wisteria-print wallpaper from Colefax and Fowler because there was 100-year-old wisteria growing in the garden outside, and I painted the ceiling in a purple shade using the Lavanda shade from my collaboration with Graphenstone. Upstairs in one of the bedrooms, I chose a wallpaper called Ortensia, which is Italian for hydrangea, and under the window there’s a flowerbed of hydrangeas. The wallpaper in the hall is called Versailles (and obviously, Turin is the Versailles of Italy) so there was a connection there too.

“A lot of the doors were already painted, so I didn’t touch them. We also kept the two painted ceilings, they’ve not needed any restoration, just a good sweep. I wasn’t sure about the diagonal tile floors but decided to keep them. They’re very Italian and we couldn’t afford to redo them anyway.

“There’s a fine line between balancing the historical with the contemporary in a home like this. In a Georgian or Victorian period property you might be putting modern furniture against architectural features like dado rails, ceiling roses, plasterwork and so on and so forth, but these rooms didn’t have that. They all had beautiful windows, and some had beautiful ceilings, but there wasn’t as much to work with. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to paint the ceilings and paper the walls, so that each room had its own character. It’s sort of like the Richard Curtis version of the original, a little more romanticised, a little more modernised – an ideal version. One of the neighbours came to see it and she said it’s almost as if we’d done nothing. Which we felt was a huge compliment, actually.

“I’ve done a few interior design retreats before, so it made sense to start doing them here, as a way to make the most of all this space. I think post-Covid, people are much more aware, not only of their surroundings, but of the importance that they play in your mental health. We talk about how you can learn to work with colour, how to do a project remotely. We take people to restaurants in Turin, we had a local guy come and do pizzas in our pizza oven. It’s a lovely atmosphere – I think interior design retreats are going to be the new wellness retreat – there’s this great hive mind and everyone just looks after each other. They were so popular this year, with people travelling from as far as Sydney, that we’re doing them in June, September and October next year, and we’ve thought about doing painting retreats too.”