Erika Genesio‘s restoration of Vigne del Fagnano 1709 in Santo Stefano Belbo refuses to let the estate feel like a hotel, even as it meets luxury hospitality standards room by room. The 18th-century noble farmhouse sits in the Langhe, the UNESCO-listed hills between Asti and Cuneo where Cesare Pavese set much of his fiction and where partisans fought during the Resistance chronicled by Pavese and Fenoglio. Genesio’s intervention treats the estate less as a commercial conversion and more as a private residence that happens to open its doors to guests.
The Anfossi family’s presence on this land predates the current structure by centuries — Piedmontese nobility with roots in Santo Stefano Belbo traced back to an Anfossi abbot in the 1100s. The 18th-century underground cellars carry that lineage forward architecturally, echoing in reduced scale the underground cathedrals of nearby Canelli, themselves a UNESCO World Heritage site. That subterranean structure isn’t a curiosity tucked beneath the property; it’s physical evidence of the estate’s role in the region’s rural economy.
Genesio organized the restoration around six fully renovated suites, each treated as a distinct space rather than a repeated hotel-room template. Beyond the suites, several lounges extend through both the residential wing and an adjacent structure that once housed the estate’s rural warehouses — now returned to its original rustic character, with exposed brick, stone walls, timber beams, and structural cavities left visible rather than concealed behind finish work.
A centuries-old maritime pine anchors the courtyard at the heart of this Piedmont boutique hotel, around which the residence and the former warehouses face each other. The courtyard itself functions as a working landscape as much as a gathering space: a vegetable garden, a century-old vine pergola, a swimming pool built from local Langa stone, a gym, and additional pergolas and outdoor lounges all extend from that central pine.
Frescoed walls throughout the estate received dedicated restoration, handled by Decorazioni Artistiche Sara&Vale under Roà Sara, work that required distinguishing between surfaces worth preserving intact and those that needed careful reconstruction to match the estate’s original character. This kind of granular material decision-making — restoring rather than replacing — runs through the project the same way it shapes HenrytiMi’s monastery conversion into Rome’s Nomos Hotel, another project where historic religious or noble architecture had to absorb hospitality function without losing its original register.
Lighting design fell to Elisabetta Paiano of BULBUS Studio, a discipline that matters more in a restoration like this than in new construction, where fixtures have to work with existing frescoed ceilings, stone walls, and timber structures rather than a blank architectural canvas. Calligrapher Massimo Polello contributed hand-lettered work throughout the property, a craft-based detail that reinforces the estate’s identity as a residence shaped by hand rather than a hospitality brand rolled out at scale.
The Langa stone swimming pool sits among the courtyard’s outdoor spaces without reading as a resort amenity bolted onto a historic property. Its material — quarried locally, the same stone vocabulary that runs through the region’s architecture — keeps the pool visually and physically tied to the landscape it sits in, rather than importing a foreign material logic the way many countryside hotel conversions do. A similar commitment to regional material identity over generic luxury signifiers shapes Braccialieri Resort in Val di Noto, where local materiality does comparable work in a different Italian landscape.
The estate’s real achievement is refusing the two easy paths available to a project like this in this Santo Stefano Belbo restoration — either a museum-like preservation that freezes the building in the 18th century, or a luxury conversion that erases its history behind contemporary hospitality finishes. Vigne del Fagnano 1709 lands somewhere more difficult to execute: a working residence where Pavese’s Langhe is legible in the stone and the frescoes, not simulated for guests passing through.
Vigne del Fagnano 1709 by Architetto Erika Genesio | Location: Via Fontanette 33, 12058 Santo Stefano Belbo (CN), Italy — Year: [da confermare] — Key materials: Langa stone, exposed brick, timber beams, restored frescoes