“Where will we gather together in the daytime and in the evening? How can I preserve a few quiet, secluded spots for reading or working? Which is the coolest area in the garden for meals in the shade?” Those were some of the questions that tastemaker Marella Agnelli, who died on Saturday at age 91 at one of her residences in Turin, Italy, told Architectural Digest in 2014 that she asked herself whenever she was decorating a new house or apartment. And there were many, each one inspiringly different from the other.
Of course, it helped that the tall, thoroughbred beauty was supremely rich, a condition that she said she only became acutely aware of after she married Gianni Agnelli, heir to the Fiat automotive fortune, in 1953. Though she had been born into one of Naples’ leading aristocratic families—her diplomat father, Filippo Caracciolo, was eighth Prince of Castagneto and third Duke of Melito, while her mother was a whiskey-distiller’s daughter from Peoria, Illinois—the newlywed claimed to have been astonished to discover that her berth on a night train to Paris had been outfitted with fresh flowers, monogrammed towels, and sheets embroidered with her and her husband’s initials. That wide-eyed memory seems a trifle disingenuous, given that the Agnellis, who co-founded Fiat in 1899, had been an astonishingly powerful clan known for its opulent lifestyle, and that the young Marella Caracciolo had been a good friend of one of Gianni’s sisters.
What surely came as more of an authentic realization was her in-laws’ racy social dynamic. As Agnelli explained in the illustrated biography Marella Agnelli: The Last Swan (Rizzoli, 2014), written with her namesake niece Marella Caracciolo Chia, “I wouldn’t say they belonged to an immoral world, just a freely amoral one—at least by comparison with the one I had grown up in, an isolated, slightly conservative world known as the anglo-beceri. It was inhabited mainly by wealthy Anglo-American expatriates, like my mother, and members of the old Italian aristocracy, like my father—a set of people who spent their days visiting one another’s exquisitely refined gardens and crumbling villas on the hills of Florence and getting into interminable philosophical disquisitions.”
As eureka moments go, however, the train trip is a telling one, given Agnelli’s adult reputation as one of the world’s most discerning aesthetes and one half a couple that Vogue once pronounced “remarkably chic.” (For a list of her favorite things, read Lucia van der Post’s 2014 exploration of Agnelli’s brand loyalties.) Decorating houses, arranging flowers, serving as a hostess, and making it all look easy—being a rich man’s wife, she found, was a full-time occupation and not one to be taken lightly. “Remember, my dear girl,” the grande dame Nathalie Volpi, contessa di Misurata, warned the newlywed Agnelli, “all one needs to catch a husband may be a bed, but it takes a whole house to keep one.” Feathering multiple marital nests was hardly what Agnelli imagined in her future when she lived in Manhattan in the early 1950s, working for top-flight photographer Erwin Blumenfeld, but it was a life in which she would make an impact far beyond her own walls. Her best rooms—insouciant, knowing, dégagé, and uncomplicated, yet, in reality, carefully perfected—have impacted the work of interior designers such as Mark D. Sykes (his 2015 Kips Bay Decorator Show House dining room was molto Agnelli) and the AD100’s Jeffrey Bilhuber, who appreciate her way of pairing the august (heavyweight antiques, art both modern and old-master) with the charming (florals, gingham, wicker).
Though “I had no aptitude for domestic concerns” as a young woman, Agnelli turned out to be a quick study, after some intense Volpi tutoring. Central to the life of her, her husband, and their two children, Edoardo and Margherita, was Villa Agnelli, an 18th-century Piedmontese Baroque country house in Villar Perosa, Italy, which was published in AD’s September 2014 issue. Radiating out from that property was a constellation of far-flung addresses, from a Honolulu penthouse straight out of Mad Men in the 1970s to the sybaritic Villa Léopolda in the South of France in the 1950s. There was an apartment at 770 Park Avenue in New York City in the 1980s, on which she worked with Renzo Mongiardino and Peter Marino. There was also an apartment in Rome and another in Milan. But she didn’t just hire decorators and architects to enhance the Agnelli mystique, she was an integral part of the creative process, as hands-on as she was when she created Abraham-Zumsteg’s Marella Range, printed-cotton fabrics fueled by her experience of working with Mongiardino on Villa Frescot, a 19th-century house that was the Agnellis’ primary residence.
“I've been fixing up houses all my life,” she told The New York Times in 1977, when the Marella Range launched in the United States. “I always helped my mother with the decorating when we moved from country to country—from Florence to Rome to Austria, Turkey, Switzerland, and France. It was a necessary job. My mother was very good at it. American women are better than Europeans at that—they have a sense of a house and expressing themselves there. In Europe, houses were done centuries ago and you don't have to move a thing.”
Agnelli brought to her homes an exacting eye for detail that won her the respect of several boldface collaborators, among them arch-minimalist architect Gae Aulenti, history-worshipping grand-homme decorators Mongiardino and Stéphane Boudin, swaggering AD100 architect-designer Peter Marino, and combustible Marrakchi tastemaker Bill Willis. Fantasist Tony Duquette even came into her orbit at one point, which resulted in a wall of her Hawaii penthouse, featured in AD in the 1970s, being paved floor-to-ceiling with abalone shells; Françoise de la Renta, the fashion designer’s wife, advised on another Manhattan flat, a cocoon of shirred fabrics so densely applied that, a visitor observed, “even the curtains have curtains.” Then, there were her relationships with landscape architects, including Russell Page, Paolo Pejrone, and the AD100’s Madison Cox. The gardens of Villa Agnelli (which she photographed for the 1998 book The Agnelli Gardens at Villar Perosa, published by Harry A. Abrams) had a whiff of the Belle Époque about them, thanks to Page and Pejrone, while at Ain Kassimou, her estate in Marrakech, she and Cox made paths foam with brilliant orange nasturtiums and established a fantastical pavilion that rises like an Arabian Nights dream from a pond, amid great rounds of lotus plants.
“Marella is and has been, first of all, a true and authentic ‘amateur professional,’ both in architecture, and not only in furnishing, but in the management of her gardens, which are always simple and festive,” Pejrone has written. "And above all, they are never solemn nor pompous. She has a sincere pleasure for small and big things: Two wild ferns at the edge of a small street fill her with joy, as much as a mature and especially well-kept garden.”
Given Agnelli’s gilded existence, buoyed by one of the world’s great industrial fortunes, and populated by one glorious house after another, her admirers commend her appreciation of simplicity. “She truly put and kept wicker on the map,” said Amy Astley, AD’s editor in chief. Agnelli being Agnelli, however, the wicker furniture that she made one of her hallmarks, manufactured by Bonacina Vittorio, is exquisitely crafted and costs the earth. Ditto the finely woven Cogolin artisanal matting that she laid across her perfectly scrubbed floors. Agnelli’s love of fresh flowers, though, is something that anybody can afford, the blossoms adding a crucial countryside sense of ease to her spaces. As she told AD in 1984, in a guest column about her style and her homes, her tastes were always growing and changing but her domestic goal always remained the same: “creating homes that are truly calm, sheltered places—spas for the soul.”
